Текст книги "The Bug House"
Автор книги: Jim Ford
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‘Suicide?’
‘Possibly. Although it’s a funny bloody way to go about it.’
Anderson gazes back along the embankment to a stand of trees. Beyond the trees, its roof visible through the branches, is the house belonging to Enrico Cabaljo.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Watson says, standing up and massaging his aching back. ‘And yes, it’s perfectly possible.’
Anderson shakes her head. ‘So this poor bastard gets hit by the train and thrown – what? – two hundred yards over those trees into the footballer’s garden?’
Nobody says anything for a while after that. They are all imagining the victim frantically wriggling like a fish on a line while the headlights of a speeding Intercity train approached inexorably and at high speed.
‘OK,’ Anderson says presently. ‘What about ID?’
‘Fortunately he didn’t land headfirst, so we’ll be able to circulate a mug shot,’ says Vos. ‘John, what about security camera footage?’
‘There are cameras front and back at the footballer’s house,’ says Fallow. ‘We might get something from them.’
‘Any coverage of the garden?’
‘The cameras are remotely monitored from a private security firm in town. Phil and I are going round there this afternoon to see what they’ve got.’
‘Nothing from the door-to-door?’
‘Nothing, boss.’
‘What about tyre tracks? If he didn’t top himself, then somebody must have driven him out here.’
‘If there were any tracks, they’ve been washed away,’ Watson says.
Once again a rueful silence falls over the assembled detectives. It strikes everybody on the bridge that while they’ve said a lot, they still don’t know anything more than when they arrived.
Anderson sighs. ‘Well that’s just bloody marvellous.’ She checks her watch. ‘I’ve got to give a statement to the jackals in five minutes.’
‘What will you tell them?’ Vos says.
‘That a body has been found in Mr Cabaljo’s garden, identity currently unknown. For now I will not be mentioning anything about the circumstances until foul play is confirmed. And if anybody asks, you will say the same. Understood?’
FOUR
At 6 a.m. on the morning of the biggest day of her career, Detective Constable Kath Ptolemy wakes alone.
Ray left four hours earlier for the ferry and a week-long tour of duty to the Baltic. The lilies he left for her are in the vase on the kitchen table, and in the meantime a couple of them have opened. Ptolemy can smell them as she forces herself to get out of the warm cocoon of her bed. She showers in lukewarm water, and by the time she returns the room is lit by murky, sodden daylight. She draws the bedroom curtains, partly to keep it out and partly because old Cyril, whose house backs onto theirs, likes to cop an eyeful whenever he can. He knows Ptolemy is police, and she suspects that’s half the thrill. She thinks that if he wasn’t eighty-three she’d send the armed response unit round, just to scare the shit out of him. Then again maybe she should be flattered by old Cyril’s interest. It’s not as if she’s got the sort of tits that are going to have Peeping Toms queuing round the block whenever she takes her bra off.
Ptolemy is originally from Frizington, a small town in west Cumbria, and for twenty-two years she never believed that anywhere on Earth could be more depressing. Then she moved to Blyth, a hundred miles east on the North Sea coast, and changed her mind. Even Ray, who was born here, jokes that one day space aliens will land on the old power station, take one look around and decide Earth is not worth invading. But beggars can’t be choosers, and much as they’d like to live in a barn conversion in rural Northumberland, the combined wages of a copper and a long-haul trucker will just about stretch to a terraced house with views to die for of the wind turbines on the north pier.
She looks longingly at the bed. But it’s no good. She has to get on with the day. She dries her hair, dabs on some moisturizer and a little bit of slap to make her look vaguely human, and thinks about what to wear. Not that she has much choice. Ptolemy regards it as one of the rich ironies of the modern, progressive CID that while women are now routinely promoted to superintendent rank and beyond, they are still obliged to wear two-piece suits to look like men. Some think it emphasizes their importance and equality – but as far as Ptolemy is concerned, all it does is exaggerate their fat backsides.
She gets dressed and opens the curtains. The rain has stopped. The strange, pale orb showing in the white, translucent sky is the sun. It may even be a nice day today. In the kitchen two more of Ray’s lilies have sprung open and the organic smell is getting overpowering. She slooshes down a cup of tea and tries and fails to eat a bowl of cornflakes and listens to Radio 2 until the seven o’clock pips. Then she collect up her car keys and leaves the house.
The BMW 4 Series with stolen plates arrives at the multistorey car park in the centre of Newcastle shortly after 8 a.m. In it are three men. The driver is a bag of nervous energy: he keeps rubbing his hands on his tracksuit bottoms, hissing through his teeth, clicking the indicator stem up and down, flicking the bill of the outsized baseball cap he always wears. His name is Delon Wombwell and he is getting on his passengers’ nerves. They are beginning to wonder if Delon has Asperger’s or ADD or Tourette’s or some other affliction that makes people want to fucking punch you in the face until you start acting normally.
‘What time is it?’ he says. Nobody replies. Delon doesn’t really want to know, so they aren’t wasting their breath telling him. There is a clock on the dashboard.
Click click. Click click. The indicator.
Tssst. Tssst. Delon’s teeth.
‘ ’Scuse me,’ says the man in the back seat. His name is Allen Philliskirk. The man in the front passenger seat, whose name is Sam Severin, hears the window being wound down and Philliskirk saying, ‘Jesus!’ – and then he feels a newspaper being frantically wafted behind him.
‘Pre-match nerves,’ Philliskirk explains. ‘Ten-to-three syndrome. Can’t help it.’
‘Thanks for the warning,’ says Severin.
Presently, Philliskirk says: ‘Mind you, there are worse things can happen. I ever tell you about Donnie Proudfoot?’
‘Jacka-fuckin’-nory.’ That is Delon.
Philliskirk continues: ‘Donnie Proudfoot. Lives in Benwell now. My old man was in the army with him in Gulf One. Anyway, Donnie got his balls shot off by an Iraqi sniper.’
‘No!’ says Delon, glancing into the rear-view mirror.
‘Anyway, right, Donnie gets pensioned out of the army and one day he’s down the job centre and sees this advert in the window: “Hod carrier wanted, three pounds an hour.” Spot on, he thinks, and he goes down to the building site to see the foreman. “It’s a tough job,” says the foreman. “Every day you’ll be required to hump sixty pound of bricks up and down a ladder.” Donnie just smiles and says, “When I was in the Gulf, I had to hump a hundred pound of kit across fifty miles of desert in just two days.” Well, the foreman was impressed by that. “You sound like just the kind of bloke we’re after,” he says. “You can start nine o’clock Monday.” Donnie’s chuffed to bits. Anyway, he’s on his way out of the foreman’s office when the foreman goes: “One thing, Donnie. How comes you left the army?” So Donnie tells him about getting his fucking knackers shot off. “Oh,” says the foreman, “in that case you’d better start at ten.” “Why’s that?” says Donnie. “Well,” says the foreman, “the lazy bastards who work on this site spend the first hour scratching their balls.” ’
Severin shakes his head. Delon is creased over with laughter. Delon’s laugh, Severin thinks, is just a little bit too hysterical. It is the kind of laugh you hear in pubs when people are pretending to have a good time.
Philliskirk leans forward and claps him jovially on the shoulder. ‘You all right, Sammy?’
‘Tiptop,’ Severin says.
‘Hello, hello,’ says Delon. ‘What have we here?’
The men in the car look to their right. A vehicle has just come up the ramp. It is a Porsche Cayenne, metallic black with sport alloys, worth in excess of £90,000. They watch it glide past, unable to see through the blacked-out windows. They watch it swing into a vacant bay and they wait for the driver to get out. They wait for him to flip the alarm system and then they watch him heading for the lifts.
The Bug House is the name Vos’s team have given to their room on the second floor of the West End police station, which is a singularly drab building overlooking Westgate Road in the Benwell district of the city. The room is officially known as 23E but gets its nickname from a long-dead, even-longer-forgotten city alderman called W James Buglass, whose bewhiskered countenance glowers over the detectives from an ornate gold frame fixed to the wall by the door. Apparently Buglass was instrumental in the formation of the Newcastle upon Tyne City Police, back in the days when the wharves were jammed with barges and collier brigs, and you couldn’t see from one side of the river to the other for masts and coal smoke. His portrait had pride of place in the old West End police headquarters at Arthur’s Hill until the building was demolished, whereupon an enterprising detective, thinking it might be worth a few quid, quietly ensured that it got lost in the move to Westgate Road. When he discovered it was worth very little indeed, he bequeathed it to West End CID, who in turn lost it to the Major Crime Unit in a game of poker. Now, scrawled onto Buglass’s luxuriant white mutton chops are the signatures of every detective who has ever worked on the squad.
Huggins and Fallow are in Vos’s office, spooling through CCTV footage from the four security cameras erected around Enrico Cabaljo’s house. The footage they are most interested in is from the camera positioned on the corner of the building, overlooking the rear patio, the koi carp pond and, hopefully, enough of the garden to see a man of Middle Eastern appearance plummeting to the ground at around 8.45 p.m. on Sunday night. This will at least confirm the theory that he was indeed hit by the train bound for Edinburgh.
The main problem is that it was pitch-black at 8.45 p.m.
Huggins and Fallow have commandeered the digital recordings from a company called Arctos SecuriVision, who have a lucrative contract to provide remote household security for all of Newcastle United’s millionaire superstars. The managing director is a former Special Branch detective who now drives an Aston Martin and lives in Darras Hall, where most of the millionaire footballers live.
‘Aren’t there any security lights at the back of the house?’ Huggins had asked the ex-detective.
‘Of course,’ he’d said. ‘But it’s all about sensor coverage. How far from the house did this bloke land?’
‘Fifty, sixty feet,’ said Fallow. ‘It’s a big garden.’
‘Well, you might be in luck. We fit all our properties with 150-watt Steinels with twelve-metre coverage. Then again, sometimes the agency turn them off to save electricity when the house is not being used. We warn them not to, but they’re fucking tight.’
In the Bug House, Huggins and Fallow are watching the TV screen. In their world it is now 8.35 p.m. on Sunday evening. All being well, ten minutes to touchdown.
‘Where were you at 8.35 p.m. on Sunday night, Johnny-boy?’ says Huggins, gazing blankly at the TV monitor in Vos’s office.
‘Having supper with Shirley, I expect.’
‘Finger food from M&S? Nice bottle of Pinot Grigio before you settled down for Downton Abbey?’
Fallow shrugs. ‘And I suppose you were jetting back from Monaco after your weekend on the yacht.’
‘Cap Ferrat, actually,’ says Huggins. He stretches his long frame and emits a roar. On the TV monitor the darkness suddenly explodes into light, and Fallow sits forward expectantly. A fox pauses for a moment, white-eyed in the full glare of the 150-watt Steinels, then pads insouciantly across the patio. A few moments later the light winks out again.
‘That’s what “Vos” means in Dutch, you know,’ Huggins says. ‘ “Fox”. Mayson told me.’
Fallow looks disbelieving. ‘The boss is Dutch?’
‘Obviously not. But we all have ancestors, Johnny-boy. “Fallow” is Norwegian for One Who Is Pussy-Whipped by His Wife, so make of that what you will.’
‘Fuck off,’ Fallow says.
They watch the darkened screen in silence for a while longer, then Huggins levers himself out of his chair and grabs a pain au chocolat from a bag on Vos’s coffee table.
‘Where the hell is everyone this morning?’ he says.
‘Bernice and the boss are down at the morgue,’ says Fallow.
‘And what about Mayson?’
‘Christ knows,’ says Fallow. ‘Probably discussing aerodynamics and terminal velocity with his pals at the university.’
Huggins goes to the glass window that makes up one wall of Vos’s office. ‘Who’s that with Una?’ he says through a mouthful of pastry.
Una Cattrall’s name is not on the portrait, but since she has run the squad’s outer office for as long as anyone can remember, she is therefore arguably its single most important component. She is a blowsy-looking woman with peroxide hair and a spray tan who is aged anywhere between forty and sixty. Huggins watches her walking across the deserted squad room with her familiar urgency, her brawny arms folded over her sizeable bosom. Behind her, having to half trot in order to keep up, is a slender, blonde-haired woman wearing a dark suit.
‘Una, my dear,’ says Huggins, holding open the door. ‘Top of the morning to you.’
‘I found this waif and stray wandering around outside,’ Una says in her forty-a-day rasp.
‘DC Kath Ptolemy,’ the blonde-haired woman says as Fallow’s eyes swivel towards her. ‘Are you DCI Vos?’
‘Do you have a name for him?’ asks Tunderman, the pathologist.
‘For the moment we’re sticking to Ahmed Doe,’ says Vos.
‘Very PC.’
‘Superintendent Anderson seems to think it’s got a ring to it. What have you got for me, Mr Tunderman?’
‘Well, the injuries are consistent with a substantial impact,’ Tunderman says. ‘However the damage to the skeletal structure and internal organs, while catastrophic, is not as severe as one might expect.’
Bernice Seagram is looking at the smashed body on the metal mortuary table. ‘What would you expect, Mr Tunderman?’
‘Almost total destruction,’ Tunderman says almost wistfully. ‘I’d guess our man was struck more of a glancing blow. You say he was suspended from a bridge?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then it’s possible the air pressure from the approaching train moved him slightly. Or perhaps he wasn’t positioned centrally. Either way the bulk of the impact was down the left side. Hence the missing leg and the crush injuries to the ribcage and pelvis.’
‘But he would have died instantly,’ Seagram says.
‘Oh good Lord, yes. Although I can’t imagine his last moments alive were terribly pleasant.’
‘What’s to say it wasn’t suicide?’ Vos says.
Tunderman tugs at his top lip. ‘Nothing in theory. But I did find this.’
He grips the dead man’s head and moves it slightly to one side to expose two bluish marks on the right side of his neck, down near the shoulder.
‘Vampire bites?’ says Vos.
‘Taser marks,’ says Tunderman, who is not renowned for his sense of humour. ‘More specifically, stun-gun marks. The electrodes were applied directly to the skin rather than being attached to propelled darts.’
‘So he was immobilized?’
‘I should say so,’ Tunderman says. ‘You get 150,000 volts zapped into your neck, you aren’t going far.’
‘What about the body itself?’ Seagram asks. ‘Any distinguishing marks?’
‘Well it’s interesting you should say that, because as a matter of fact there is one very distinct anatomical anomaly. However I doubt very much the fall caused it, and I am absolutely certain it is not a natural defect.’
Seagram looks at Vos, who in turn looks at Tunderman as the pathologist carefully leans over the body and removes the sheet covering it.
‘Ouch,’ says Vos.
Outside the hospital, in the sheltered area reserved for recuperating patients to get some air, Seagram lights a menthol cigarette.
‘Give me one of those, will you?’ Vos says, grabbing one from the packet.
‘I thought you’d moved to mini-cigars, boss,’ Seagram says, passing him a lighter.
‘I’m smoking too many of them,’ Vos says. ‘I’m going back to poncing cigarettes off you.’ He lights the cigarette and draws the smoke down deep into his lungs. ‘Christ, it’s like sucking on a Polo mint.’
They smoke in silence together for a while. Then Seagram says: ‘Fuck me, somebody branded his balls?’
‘Don’t tell Huggins. He’ll be blaming it on militant feminists.’
‘I don’t know any militant feminist organizations with the initials “KK”.’
‘Me neither. But I’m no expert. All I know is, it must have been painful.’
‘Tunderman said it wasn’t recent. What do you think? Torture?’
‘Possibly. Maybe initiation?’
‘You think he went to public school? That could explain the stun gun to the neck as well. These Eton types are all fucking masochists.’
It’s meant as a joke, but Vos says nothing. He is gazing at a young man in a wheelchair being pushed lethargically around a small maze of bushes by a porter who looks like he would much rather be doing something else – and Seagram knows he is thinking about Vic Entwistle. His consigliere. Lying in a hospital bed with a bullet in his spine and unlikely to walk again.
‘You want another ciggie, boss?’
‘No thanks,’ Vos says. ‘Let’s get back.’
‘Ptolemy?’ Huggins says. ‘What sort of name is that?’
‘Greek Cypriot.’
Fallow looks at her in surprise. Her green eyes and pale, freckled complexion suggest Celtic ancestry, even if her accent is unadulterated Cumbrian.
‘My husband’s family are from Famagusta. He always said that by marrying him I would stand out from the crowd.’
‘He was right.’
‘So what does he do,’ Fallow says. ‘Your husband?’
‘Long-distance lorry driver.’
‘Must be hard.’
‘We get by,’ Ptolemy says.
‘How long have you been married?’ says Huggins.
‘Two years.’
‘And how old are you?’
‘Twenty-four. Is this an interrogation?’
‘We’re just wondering what the fuck you’re doing here, to be honest.’
She looks at Huggins blankly. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, you’ve got a cushy number up there in – Alnwick, is it? Rounding up red-diesel thieves and sheep rustlers? Investigating burglaries at the golf club? Stick around long enough and you’ll be a DI before you’re thirty, a regular Sunday evening TV detective. Why the hell would you want to come here? To the Bug House?’
Ptolemy fixes him with her pale eyes. ‘It wasn’t my decision,’ she says.
‘You didn’t put in a transfer request?’
‘The first I knew about it was when Detective Superintendent Anderson said I was being seconded.’
Huggins and Fallow look at each other.
‘Christ, the boss is going to love that,’ Fallow says.
Ptolemy is about to speak when her attention is caught by something on the TV screen. ‘Bloody hell,’ she says. ‘Rewind that.’
Fallow, who along with Huggins was too busy interrogating the new recruit to pay attention to the screen, grabs the remote and scrolls back a few seconds.
‘There!’ Ptolemy says, pointing at the screen.
As she speaks, the darkness is illuminated as something moves with great speed in the periphery of the picture – and suddenly, as if by some cinematic trick or time-lapse photography, there is a body lying on the lawn.
Ahmed Doe has landed. In the world of Huggins and Fallow, it is 8.47 p.m. on Sunday evening.
There is a fly in the window of the site office Portakabin bashing itself drunkenly against the plastic pane with a tok-tok-tok sound. Delon Wombwell stands poised beside it, his rolled-up newspaper raised in a white-knuckled fist, the red point of his tongue poking from his mouth.
Tok-tok-tok.
WHUP!
Delon brings the newspaper down onto the pane. The fly drops to the sill and spins spastically on its back.
WHUP! WHUP! WHUP!
‘Fuck’s sake, Delon,’ Philliskirk says irritably. ‘I think it’s dead.’ He is sitting in the far corner of the rectangular box, his tin of rolling tobacco open on the table in front of him. Through the window behind him, a huge metal claw plunges into a stack of written-off cars and closes inexorably around the shell of a smashed-up Renault.
Delon peers at the business end of his newspaper. The fly is smeared across the newsprint like black and red marmalade. Its limbs and wings are crushed into tiny colons, commas and full stops.
‘Fucking bastard,’ Delon remarks. He wipes the newspaper on his trousers and throws it on the floor.
‘Where the fuck is Tiernan?’ Philliskirk says.
‘He’s here.’
Severin, standing at the window, watches a stocky, well-dressed man with white hair climb out of a dark-blue Range Rover and make his way across the yard. He says nothing. A moment later Tiernan stands in the doorway, one hand jabbed into the pocket of his expensive leather jacket, the other holding a slim case containing a laptop computer.
‘Afternoon, gentlemen,’ he says briskly.
Delon jumps. Philliskirk reaches for his tobacco tin and papers and begins methodically constructing a cigarette.
Severin points at his watch. ‘You’re late.’
‘You’re not the only crew I’ve got,’ says Tiernan with a grin. ‘But if you’d like to make something of it, I’m all ears.’
Dust and curlicues of cigarette smoke are caught in the bare strip light. The only sound is the squeal and crash of metal being mangled.
‘Thought not,’ Tiernan says. ‘So what have you got for me, boys? If you’re in a hurry, I don’t want to keep you.’
Severin pulls a memory stick from the back pocket of his jeans. Mr Tiernan opens the laptop and plugs the attachment into a USB port on the side. The display on the screen is reflected in the lenses of his glasses as he scrolls down.
‘Porsche Cayenne. Very good, boys,’ he says presently. ‘Very good indeed.’
Over by the door Delon, who has been holding his breath, lets it out noisily.
Tiernan closes the laptop and zips up the case. ‘There’ll be some good commission on this one all right, boys,’ he says.
‘When do you want it done?’ says Severin.
‘I’ll need to sort the paperwork,’ says Mr Tiernan. ‘I’ll let you know.’
At the door he pauses and stoops to pick up Delon’s discarded newspaper.
‘You read about this stiff they found in Enrico Cabaljo’s back garden?’ he says, unrolling the paper and flapping the front page at the four men. ‘I reckon they should sign him up. Got to be better than the midfield they’ve got at the moment.’
Vos and Seagram get back to the West End at midday, having spent a fruitless morning waiting for any sort of definitive forensic reports from the scene or DNA identification of the victim. All they have is the postmortem result, which does not answer the pressing questions that lie at the heart of the whole conundrum, namely who is Ahmed Doe? And why did someone tie him to a railway bridge?
On the way upstairs to the second floor, Vos’s phone rings.
‘Get the team ready in the meeting room,’ he tells Seagram, peering at the number on the screen. ‘I’ll see you there in a minute.’
When he eventually stalks onto the floor of the Bug House five minutes later, it seems to Seagram that Vos is in an even worse mood than before. Who the hell was the call from? she wonders. The tax man? What worries her is that any second now the boss’s black dog is going to start ripping out throats. As he heads across to the meeting room, she hurries across to intercept him.
‘Boss, the replacement is here,’ she says, careful not to say ‘the replacement for Entwistle’.
He stops and looks down at her. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know.’
The meeting room is a cosy little annexe separated from the squad room by a partition wall. Its focal point is a large pull-down screen for the overhead projector, but as no one has ever figured out how the projector works in over ten years, the screen is used instead as an oversized memo board and is scarred with pinholes, Sellotape marks and crusts of Blu-tack from hundreds of different cases. Right now the board looks distinctly bare: a handful of assorted photographs from the scene, a map of the area around Stannington, a few desultory Post-it notes.
The squad is assembled and waiting.
‘I take it you’ve all met DC Ptolemy,’ Vos says, sweeping past them on his way to the board, and Ptolemy, who feels like the new girl in a classroom where everyone knows each other and, more importantly, knows the teacher, finds herself with a rictus smile on her face and wondering if she should wave or give a bow or just stand up and curtsey.
Instead she looks for help from Huggins and Fallow, with whom she has spent most of the morning, but they are just staring ahead with grim faces, as if they can sense teacher is in a bad mood. As for the other guy – Calvert? – he’s only just arrived himself and hasn’t made a sound, other than a dismissive grunt on his way to the nearest computer terminal. In fact, as she looks round the room, the only one who meets her gaze is the only other woman on the squad, Acting DS Seagram – and her nod of acknowledgement, while little more than a fractional tilt of the chin, seems like the most heart-warming welcome imaginable.
‘OK,’ Vos says. ‘So what we know is this: some time before 8.47 p.m. on Sunday night, Ahmed Doe is tied to a railway bridge by person or persons unknown. Prior to that, according to the pathologist, he was incapacitated with a stun gun. At 8.47 p.m. he is struck by the Newcastle to Edinburgh train. The body is catapulted into the neighbouring garden of our footballing friend, where it is discovered the next morning by the gardener. As yet we have no name for the victim, and his only distinguishing feature is a distinctive tattoo or branding mark on his testicles. Any questions? John?’
‘The branding mark,’ Fallow says. ‘Are we thinking torture?’
‘I’m more inclined to go with gang initiation. Mayson, do a trawl of the international databases. See if there’s any mention of this KK design.’
‘You think our guy is foreign?’ Huggins says. ‘I mean he looks foreign, but—’
‘I don’t think anything, Phil. I’m relying on you people to tell me. And unless he was a masochist escapologist who got it wrong, we are treating this as murder. I take it you’ve worked a murder case before?’
It takes a moment for Ptolemy to realize that Vos is talking to her.
‘Yes, sir.’
Ptolemy wonders if Vos has read her file. Her one and only murder case as a detective was a domestic disagreement that got out of hand in a remote cottage in the Cheviots. A farm hand had returned home at the end of a two-day bender and taken exception to his wife’s nagging, killing her with a single punch. He had then called the police and had been sitting in his kitchen, waiting, when Ptolemy and the uniformed response unit arrived an hour later.
‘So what do you think?’
She clears her throat. ‘I was . . . thinking about motive, sir?’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, the nature of the victim’s death suggests to me one of two things: either the killer was teaching him a lesson, or he was sending a message.’
To her surprise, Vos nods at Seagram, who writes the two words ‘LESSON’ and ‘MESSAGE’ on the board in black felt-tip.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘What do we think about that?’
‘Either way it’s been carried out with extreme prejudice,’ Huggins says.
‘It’s got to be gang-related,’ Fallow says.
And then everybody is speculating at once, leaving Ptolemy not knowing what to say.
Eventually Vos calls order. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘I think we all know what needs to be done. Let’s get to work.’ Then he looks at Ptolemy. ‘Come with me,’ he says. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’
Vos’s car is parked in the staff car park at the rear of the building. By the time Ptolemy has finished buckling her seatbelt, Vos has already swung the vehicle into the traffic streaming west out of the city.
‘So what do you think?’ he says.
‘Of the team? They’re nice. I like them.’
‘No doubt Huggins and Fallow have already invited you out for a drink.’
She smiles. ‘Phil did suggest it would be a good idea to bond.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Maybe another time.’
‘Wise move,’ Vos says. ‘Huggins has still got one foot in the sixth-form common room. Fallow is just easily led astray. You go drinking with them, you’ll end up at two in the morning in a lap-dancing bar on the Quayside.’
‘I thought DC Fallow was married, sir.’
‘He is,’ Vos says.
‘DC Calvert seems a little . . .’
‘Odd? He is. Sometimes I don’t understand a word he says. But he’s harmless. And if you ever want your house rewiring, he’s your man. But if you have any problems, see Bernice Seagram. Or Una Cattrall. In fact, just see Una. She runs the department.’
They head down the hill, past the municipal crematorium and out beyond the Western Bypass to the A69 dual carriageway that connects the city to the market towns and villages of the Tyne Valley commuter belt.
‘Detective Superintendent Anderson thinks a great deal of you,’ Vos says. ‘She tells me you were hand-picked to join my squad.’
‘It was a surprise,’ Ptolemy admits. ‘I didn’t even know I was on a shortlist.’
‘You could have said no.’
‘You don’t say no to a detective superintendent, sir.’
Ptolemy sees a half-smile on Vos’s face.
‘Good answer, Ptolemy,’ he says. ‘You’ll go far.’
They’re out beyond the city now. Though it’s only six o’clock, ahead of them the sun is already starting to sink with the depressing inevitability of early autumn.
‘You could have said no, sir,’ she says.
‘No to what?’
‘To me joining your squad. I assume you’ve read my file. I’m not very experienced.’
‘I haven’t read your file, Ptolemy,’ Vos says. ‘And I don’t intend to.’
He indicates left and turns onto the slip road marked Heddon-on-the-Wall. Soon they come to a pub called the Three Tuns, positioned on a crossroads. Vos swings into the car park and he and Ptolemy go inside. It’s the calm before early doors; just a handful of regulars at the bar. Vos buys a pint of bitter and a lime and soda and then leads Ptolemy into a quiet corner, away from the inevitable TV screen.
‘Can I ask you something, sir?’ Ptolemy says.
‘Sure.’
‘What do you think happened? To the victim.’
Vos says nothing for a while. ‘To be honest, I don’t know what to think,’ he says presently. ‘But I will soon enough.’
‘Well, thanks for including me,’ Ptolemy says. ‘I won’t let you down.’
