21
THE QUIET ONES
The following morning, Raymond Land sat down tentatively on the leather swivel chair Longbright had found for him and looked out of the filthy window. Below, traffic on the Caledonian Road had choked itself to a standstill. He should have been at home in bed, reading the papers.
He turned back to study the dingy brown room and realised with a sinking sensation that he was now worse off than he had been before. His fate was once more tied to the unit, his dreams of retirement had retreated even further, and his new surroundings were positively Dickensian. Creaking forward in his chair, he peered into a cobwebbed corner of the room, then rose to examine it. A patch of stained wallpaper had divorced itself from the grey plaster, as if the room had died and was sloughing its skin. Something was revealed underneath, part of a design. Reaching on tiptoe, he brushed aside the spiders and seized the edge, gently pulling. A metre of damp paper rolled slowly down, tore and fell on the floor in a cloud of mildew spores.
Land found himself looking at a drawing of a naked man poised between two tall iron braziers. He appeared to be having intimate congress with a goat that was standing on its hind legs and wearing black leather thigh-boots. Shocked, Land attempted to cover over the drawing, but the paper would no longer stick to the wall.
In his own room, Arthur Bryant was seated on top of some packing boxes, nonchalantly swinging his legs back and forth as he thumbed through a reference book.
‘What the hell was this place?’ Land demanded to know, storming into the detective’s office. ‘There’s something really unpleasant and unwholesome about it. There’s a very bad feeling here. You told me it was a warehouse.’
‘No, mon vieux fromage, I said it was a whorehouse,’ replied Bryant, not bothering to look up. ‘Later it reverted to its original use as a warehouse.’
‘That doesn’t entirely explain why there is a picture of a man passionately embracing a farmyard animal on my wall.’
‘Show me.’ Bryant climbed down from his packing crate and led the way.
They examined the picture together. ‘That’s a puzzler,’ Bryant agreed. ‘It’s rather too well sketched to be the work of a bored workman. Look at those flesh tones. And the perspective is most convincing. Don’t you think?’
‘I don’t give a stuff about its artistic merit, I want to know what it’s doing here. Look.’ Land pointed across to the corners of the room, to where the two blackened iron braziers stood. ‘They’re the ones in the drawing. Does that mean there’s been a goat up here, too?’
‘Oh, it’s probably some bored packing clerk’s idea of a joke,’ said Bryant, unconvincingly. ‘How are you settling in?’
‘I can’t do any work without at least some rudimentary equipment. I thought we had it bad at Mornington Crescent but this is infinitely worse. Look at this.’ He indicated a dark gap beside the ratty armchair he had placed in the corner. ‘There’s a hole that goes all the way down to the basement. The floor’s rotten. Suppose I fell through it? The place isn’t fit for habitation.’
‘We needed something near the site that was instantly available, and this was all I could find,’ Bryant explained. ‘I’ll tell you what—why don’t you work from home for a few days?’
‘Oh, no, I’m not falling for that old trick. I need to be here, where I can keep an eye on you. God knows what you’ll get up to otherwise.’
‘Then I guess you’ll have to make the best of it.’ Bryant dragged out the pieces of his pipe and began to fit the bowl to the stem.
‘You are not going to smoke that in here!’
‘Actually, I thought the scent of my Aromatic Rough Cut Full Strength Navy Shag might dispel the smell of damp. I’m glad you popped by, Raymond. I was about to come in and see you. I am the bearer of good news. We have an identity for the body in the freezer. His name’s Terry Delaney and he lives just a couple of streets away, in Wharfdale Road. He was arrested on a D and D some years back, but no charges were pressed. He listed his profession as a builder. There’s nothing else on file, but that’s enough.’
‘So they did have his prints, after all. How did you get hold of them?’
‘Oh, I didn’t. Kershaw used the St Pancras office to request them. Longbright and Renfield are on their way right now. I’m not sending anyone in alone where there may be organised crime involved.’
Land was relieved. ‘Then all we need to do is round up his mates. He probably crossed his drug dealer. We could get a lock on a couple of suspects by nightfall.’
‘Let’s not jump the gun, Raymond.’ Bryant tamped his pipe and lit it. ‘I have a feeling things aren’t going to be quite so simple as you’d like.’ Bryant held in his head the image of a murderer dressed in the skin of a stag, but decided not to share it with the detective inspector for now.
Jack Renfield’s shoulder did the trick. Terry Delaney’s landlord lived in Holland, and the woman downstairs had no spare key, so there was no choice but to break down Delaney’s door. Renfield had played rugby until a back injury had put him out of the game, and was easily able to smash the lock apart.
‘Blimey.’ Longbright stepped into the hallway and tried the overhead light, but the bulb was broken. ‘Someone’s had a real go at this place.’
The apartment had been ransacked. Progressing from room to room, the detectives were shocked by the scale of the destruction. Every sofa cushion, mattress and seat had been slashed open and picked apart, every cupboard emptied and its shelves removed, every stick of furniture disjointed. A shelf contained books on the history of King’s Cross, but every copy had been tipped down and torn apart. The carpets had been pried up and the floorboards examined, and some of the bathroom tiles had been removed. In the main bedroom even the wall radiator had been taken off, and yet there was order here. The dissection had been carried out with elaborate care; the component parts were laid in careful rows as if they were all to be reassembled.
‘Whoever did this expected Delaney to have hidden something well,’ said Longbright.
‘What did they expect to find inside a chair, for God’s sake?’
‘Drugs? High-denomination banknotes?’ Longbright suggested.
They tried the bathroom. Longbright watched as the sergeant removed the side panel of the bath and rolled under it with a torch. ‘No blood on any of the surfaces, but I think Delaney was murdered here.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘The bath’s been cleaned by an expert, but he forgot to empty the U-bend trap. Hang on.’ Renfield rooted about. ‘There’s a piece of shredded paper towel inside, looks like it’s absorbed blood. I can’t see it clearly but I can smell it.’
He slid back out covered in dust balls, and tapped the side of his thick nose. ‘Never lets me down, this. Banbury might be able to fish whatever it is out without it breaking apart, but I shouldn’t think he’ll be able to perform much useful analysis on it.’ He set the drain trap to one side for bagging. ‘The killer didn’t cut Delaney’s head off here. That would have emptied blood all over the apartment. This is just a small amount.’
In the kitchen, Longbright pulled a folded newspaper from the cascaded spice pots and sugar bags on the counter. It was a copy of the Daily Mirror, dated April 25. She needed to check Delaney’s clothes for anything that could give her a later date. It would be useful to turn up a photo.
She went through the ransacked jackets and jeans in the bedroom wardrobe, and found an Oyster tube pass tucked inside a plastic sleeve. ‘Hey, technology we can deal with,’ said Renfield, bagging it. The card would show when and at which station it was last used. ‘There’s more.’ He dug into the jacket and produced an employee photocard.
‘You sure this bloke’s involved with organised crime?’ asked Longbright.
‘Why?’
She examined the laminated square. The head shot showed an innocuous, pleasant-faced shaven-headed man in his early thirties. There was a softness in his eyes that somehow suggested he was a husband and father. ‘Delaney just doesn’t look the type to me. He’s got a kid, a little girl. There’s a picture of her in the bedroom.’
Renfield snorted. ‘You can’t be sure who’s a villain these days. Says he works at a painting and decorating company in Highbury.’
‘Let’s go and talk to the downstairs neighbour,’ Longbright suggested.
‘I can’t tell you anything about him because I don’t know anything,’ said Mrs Mbele as she tried to claw her young son back from the precipitous drop of the stairs. ‘He was here before me, friendly enough but silent as the grave. You’re lucky to get two words out of him. A bit of a loner. Divorced.’
‘Did you ever see him throw a moody, keep bad company, get drunk?’ asked Longbright, thinking of the D&D charge.
‘No, a bit wobbly a couple of times coming up the front steps late but nothing to give you trouble. These floorboards creak and you can hear everything that goes on overhead, so it’s good to have someone nice and quiet here. Why? Has something happened?’
‘When did you last see him?’ asked Renfield.
‘About two weeks ago.’
‘Exactly two weeks? Morning or afternoon? Think for a moment, please. This is important.’
‘I think it was the Monday morning before last.’
‘Coming in or going out?’
‘Going out. I suppose he was going to work, ’cause he always left early during the week. We stayed at my sister’s that night so I didn’t see him again.’
‘How was he?’
‘Same as always. Smiled and gave my boy a little wave, went out the front door. I never encouraged him to be friendly.’
‘Any particular reason why not?’
‘He’s a bit rough, you know? What you call salt of the earth. I once heard him swearing on the phone to a mate. I didn’t want my boy picking anything up. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a very nice man, works long hours, always pleasant.’
‘Ever have any mates around here, did he?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ Mrs Mbele picked up her scrambling son and threw him onto her shoulder like a cat. ‘Sorry, I’m not being very helpful, am I?’
‘Any women?’
‘One, quite young—not his wife, ’cause he showed me a photo of her.’
‘What did she look like?’
Mrs Mbele thought for a moment. ‘Ordinary,’ she said finally.
‘Amazing how people share the same house for years and know nothing about each other,’ said Renfield as he called the PCU’s Crime Scene Manager with their location. ‘What the hell could he have done to make someone want to saw his head off? It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.’
‘He might have surprised a burglary in progress,’ suggested Longbright.
‘You’re joking, aren’t you? Take a look at this place, Janice.’ He pointed up at the peeling stucco and dirt-crusted windows. ‘Can you see the signs of wealth that would attract a burglar to a dump like this? Besides, what kind of burglar arranges everything on the floor in neat little piles?’
‘Maybe he did that because he didn’t want to make a noise. You heard what she said about the floorboards.’
‘You’re not suggesting Delaney did it himself?’
‘Perhaps he lost something and was desperate to find it.’
‘So he slashes open his own sofa cushions and even empties out the kitchen flour jar? I thought you PCUers were supposed to come up with stuff that would never cross the minds of us lowly Metropolitan plods.’
Janice smiled. ‘You’re PCU too now, remember.’
‘Yeah, and you were Met once. You know what we’re like. Fair-minded, decent, but not always the sharpest knives in the drawer. And rough as guts, as you’re so fond of reminding us.’
Longbright remembered. If the Met coppers were blunt-edged it was because they had to be. You could only clean vomit off your trousers and return a runaway kid to its drugged-up parents so many times before you started wanting to smack someone or throw them in prison. And when you found yourself arresting the grandchildren of the men and women you were arresting at the start of your career, it was time to get out.
Renfield shot her a sly look. ‘Of course, I only switched sides because I thought it might give me a chance with you.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Don’t use a double positive to suggest a negative—it makes you sound like a teenager.’
Longbright raised an eyebrow. If there was one thing everyone knew about Renfield, it was that he had no sense of humour. Had he just made a joke? Wonders would never cease. ‘If you’re going to keep flirting with me, Jack,’ she cautioned him, ‘you’d damn well better mean it.’
‘Oh, I mean it all right.’ He caught her gaze and held it until she broke away.
‘We used to make fun of you all the time. I mean, when you were with the Met.’ She always felt it was best to be honest. ‘We thought being a desk sergeant all those years had got to you. We knew we could tease you about your name, because you’d never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve read it now. I don’t think I’m quite the same bloke anymore. The Met feels a long way behind me.’
‘I know what you mean.’ Longbright smiled at the thought. ‘I think of those long nights collating records, avoiding male attention, doing my fitness training for postings on the Territorial Support Group, then drinking bottles of whisky left in the CID offices. I did a lot of ops for TSG, surveillance jobs lying on my stomach among the corpses of pigeons on the flat roof of some windy council block, peeping over the side of what seemed to be a cliff, looking down on some estate agent’s about to be robbed or watching some dozy drug dealer do business from his house. Not the best way to spend your life. The smell of bird shit cleared my sinuses, though. I never had a problem staying detached—I think we all had a good sense of black humour—but the work got to me at times. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed being operational. I still love pulling down a long shift. But John and Mr Bryant were my salvation.’
‘Some of the riots were bad,’ said Renfield. ‘I remember a lot of West End officers got hurt after an anti-capitalist clash in Oxford Street—they were sitting around the yard in bloody bandages, deathly quiet; it was like a field hospital. And the commissioner came round in plainclothes with his Personal Protection Officers, like some general inspecting the troops. I think one of the PPOs told him they wouldn’t be able to protect him, ’cause they all turned tail and walked out in the street. The Met took the fall for that particular outbreak of civil unrest, but it was really the economy that was the cause. I don’t want to see that happen again.’
It was the longest speech she had ever heard from Renfield. The sergeant had made an error of judgement in the course of his duty that had ultimately cost a life, and knew he would have to live with the mistake forever. He had been appointed a therapist, and although he had only recently started attending sessions, Longbright could already see he was changing.
‘Anyway, we talked about you as well,’ he told Longbright. ‘We had a nickname for you at the station.’
‘You did? What was it?’
‘Frostyknickers.’
‘Oh, cheers.’
‘But I always liked you.’
‘I can’t think why.’
‘You’re strong. There’s something real about you, sort of sturdy—’ Renfield broke off.
‘Sturdy is not a word women long to hear used to describe them, Jack.’
‘Solid, then.’
‘You’re digging a hole for yourself.’
‘You know—womanly, only more of a—’ At the point where he enlisted the help of his hands in trying to describe her, she stopped him.
‘If you’re going to call me a rough diamond I’ll clout you.’
‘No. You’re more of a pearl than a diamond.’ Renfield did not realise that he was almost endearing when he was being honest. ‘There’s a soft lustre about you.’ He looked embarrassed now.
Longbright broke the awkwardness between them. ‘Jack, listen, one of us should stay here and wait for Dan.’
‘Why, where’s the other one going?’
Longbright held up the laminated ID card. ‘Highbury. Got a coin?’
Renfield flicked the ten-pence piece and slapped it on his wrist. ‘You call.’
‘Tails.’
‘Tails it is.’
‘I’ll go. I could do with the exercise.’ Longbright turned up her collar and stepped out into gently sifting rain.