8
STALEMATE
Colin Bimsley was smudged with thick white dust. It was matted in his cropped fair hair and even falling out of his ears as he hopped about on the kerb outside the derelict takeaway at the end of the Caledonian Road. He seemed inordinately excited about something.
‘I wasn’t sure if you’d got my message,’ he called to the approaching detective. ‘I tried Mr Bryant but his phone was switched off.’
‘Yes, it would be,’ agreed John May. ‘The last time we spoke, Arthur told me he was getting too many phone calls from the dead. Apparently he subscribed to a psychics’ hotline and is now being pestered by people wanting him to avenge their murders. It’s a scam to make him use premium phone lines, but he doesn’t realise that. What are you doing around here?’
‘This is Rafi.’ Bimsley introduced his new friend. ‘I called you first. Rafi’s got a serious problem, and I thought he’d be better off talking to you.’
‘Let’s go inside.’ The dark flat-bottomed clouds above their heads were threatening a deluge. Bimsley led the way through the store to the cluttered rear room and opened the lid of the freezer. May peered in. The body was virtually hairless, Caucasian, ordinary, mid-thirties at a guess.
‘Rafi bought himself a lease on a shop and found he’d already got his first customer. The freezer had been hidden behind some boxes.’
‘You didn’t know this was here?’ May asked Rafi.
‘I swear. I don’t want no trouble. I just want to get my shop open.’
‘Who had the place before you?’
‘An African guy—’
‘—But Rafi got it through an agent,’ Bimsley explained. He felt the need to protect this man, who had given him a job without knowing anything about him. ‘He didn’t meet the former owner, and the place was left empty for a month with the door unlocked, so anyone could have come in. We’ve got a white male with his head removed; the only noticeable identifying mark is a tattoo around the left upper arm. And you’re going to find my dabs all over the lid.’
‘Let’s have a look at the tattoo,’ said May, gingerly raising a swollen limb to examine the wreath of entwined ivy branches. ‘It goes all the way around.’
‘Armbands were popular in the 1990s: Buddhist mantras, twisted ivy, roses and thorns—a lot of clubbers had them, and this is a big clubbing area.’
‘It doesn’t make sense. If someone’s gone to the trouble of cutting off the head, they’d also remove the tattoo and the hands to prevent the body from being easily recognised. He’s done a lot of manual labour; the fingers are pretty calloused.’ May examined the edges of the freezer. ‘No blood? Seen any on the floor?’
‘Look at the state of this place, John. Builder’s rubble everywhere. We’ll have to strip it.’
We won’t have to strip it, they will, thought John May, knowing that the case would go to either Camden or Islington Met, depending on whose jurisdiction the store fell under. The dividing line between the boroughs ran somewhere around here. He dropped to his haunches and looked about. ‘You’re right. I’m dying to have a look, but we’d create problems moving anything right now.’
‘The front of the shop is all glass, so the counter and eating area are exposed to the street.’
‘No.’ May pointed up at several pairs of hooks in the corner of the ceiling. ‘They’ve taken blinds down. A lot of the shops and pubs around here have wooden shutters.’
‘There’s a pile of strong plastic sacks in the back that look like they might have been used for something.’
‘What makes you think that?’
Bimsley scratched his snub nose. ‘Dunno. They’re in the wrong place. Like someone’s shifted them around to kneel on.’
‘It would have made a mess, taking off the body identification.’
‘You reckon he was murdered off-site, and this place was convenient?’
‘I didn’t say he was murdered. He could have died, and it’s in the interest of someone to keep his identity a secret, at least for a few days. I’d have thought he died here. You don’t drag a body to a place like this in a busy high street when there’s a huge deserted industrial site just up the road.’
‘The Met won’t give us this, will they?’ asked Colin.
‘No, why should they? We’re nobody anymore. You’d better take your friend outside, he doesn’t look very well.’
May was itching to disturb the site and make a careful examination of the space, but he no longer had authority to call in a forensic team. Besides, who would he be able to summon? As soon as they found out he was interfering on their patch, the Met would kick him out and take Mr Abd al-Qaadir into custody.
He looked back at the freezer. The lid had provided a partial seal, so the decay would have been created largely by internal bacteria. How would that affect pinpointing an accurate time of death? The previous tenants of the store had known there was a freezer sitting here. Either it was empty when they left, or they had hoped that the discovery of its contents would occur long after they had gone. At least he had a starting point.
May swung the front door back and forth, trying out the lock. It looked shut from outside, but you could pop it with a little pressure. If it was someone who knew the area, they’d know that the shop was vacant, even if it had its blinds down—except …
Except it wasn’t his case. In fact, if Bimsley had stumbled across a pile of corpses thirty feet high, it would have nothing to do with any of them. He opened the lid once more and studied the blue-red-grey neck, the stump so neatly cut around the bone that he could have been looking at a surgical amputation. Finding a body in an area like this was not exactly a rare event: King’s Cross was a confluence of five railway stations and as many major roads, where thousands of commuters, students and tourists daily crossed paths. There was always something bad happening nearby…
Slowly, a plan began to form in May’s mind. He called Bimsley back in. ‘Colin, I need you to hang on here,’ he explained. ‘Keep the doors shut and don’t admit anyone until I return. And don’t let Mr Abd al-Qaadir out of your sight.’
‘Do you want me to start searching for the head? I could have a look around—’
‘—and fall over something. No, don’t disturb anything. Try to get hold of Dan Banbury; have him come over if you can. You’d better stress that this is entirely unofficial—make sure he doesn’t say anything to anyone about where he’s going. I doubt you’ll find the head on the premises. There wouldn’t be much point in removing the victim’s most visible feature then leaving his face in a cupboard.’
‘Maybe he was wearing an unusual hat,’ said Bimsley. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I have to take someone to afternoon tea,’ May replied.
Leslie Faraday enjoyed the rituals of his working day, starting with a cup of Earl Grey and some biscuits, preferably Lincolns, Garibaldis or Ginger Nuts, as he thumbed through his correspondence; café au lait mid-morning as he broke down his departmental expenditure into the kind of detail that could make the collected works of Anthony Trollope look like a fast read; then a nice carb-heavy luncheon in the office canteen, preferably the kind of pudding or pie that would take him back to his days at boarding school; and a nice mug of builder’s tea mid-afternoon, served with a slice of Battenberg cake or Black Forest Gateau. He was pear-shaped by habit, physically and mentally. His brain operated like a traction engine, slowly but with an inexorable progress that flattened everything in its path. No detail, however small, escaped his attention, and as the budget overseer of London’s specialist police units he was fully entitled to poke his nose into everything.
After questioning costs, trimming sails and cutting corners, he would annotate and parenthesise his documents, aware of every grammatical nuance, never stopping to consider the bigger ethical and moral dilemmas posed by his job. He kept his pens tidy and his head below the parapet and worked all the hours God sent, never thinking that one day someone might fire him just to wipe the look of smugness from his face. In this sense Faraday was the perfect civil servant, remembering everything and understanding nothing. He toiled on the accumulation and expedition of data, not in the hope of advancement, but in the resigned expectation that one day it would require him to betray his superiors.
Faraday would not be drawn into a meeting with Raymond Land, the ineffectual temporary acting head of the PCU, because he knew that Land would want to complain about his retirement package. He was quite happy to return John May’s call, however, because the detective had always treated him with equanimity, no matter how petty the official’s requests sometimes seemed. So it was that he made himself available at short notice and appeared at Fortnum & Mason for afternoon tea on the dot of four, to be met by a phalanx of sycophantic waiters armed with very tiny, very expensive sandwiches. Faraday appeared to be unaware that this kind of afternoon tea was an elaborate ritualistic parody provided for tourists who wanted to believe that the London of 1880 still existed. The froufrou pink-and-cream décor, the tea-strainers and doilies and cake stands, were the trappings of a cheap seaside boardinghouse elevated to absurdist theatre props, but all that shot over his balding head.
‘Well, this is a nice surprise,’ Faraday lied, leaning back while a member of staff draped a bleached linen square across his lap. ‘I heard about your unfortunate mishap with the lease at Mornington Crescent.’
‘A technical formality, I’m sure,’ May lied back, accepting tea as pale as urine, piddled from a great height by a constricted silver spout. ‘It’s simply a matter of finding new premises.’
‘Not so simple, sadly.’ Faraday offered up a look of pantomimed injury. ‘Mr Kasavian, our security supervisor, doesn’t feel there’s really a pressing need for operational units like the PCU anymore.’
‘One of the unit’s main remits has always been to prevent loss of public faith in law and order,’ said May.
‘A rather nebulous concept, one feels,’ said Faraday, lasciviously eyeing the sandwiches.
‘Not when it involves the potential loss of millions, perhaps even billions, of pounds.’
Faraday’s fingers had been straying waywardly toward a Bath bun, but now he was brought up short. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
May knew he had to build his case carefully. ‘London is a major global crossing point, and King’s Cross is now the crossing point of London. As the home of the largest and most complex regeneration project in Europe, it’s undergoing the biggest upheaval in its millennia-old history. It’s where the channel tunnel arrives, and is set to act as the terminus for the Olympics. The government is hoping to attract billions in overseas investment to the area, and the building schedule must be strictly maintained if contracts are to be honoured. Of course you know all of this.’
‘Oh, indeed. Of course. Understood.’ Faraday looked blankly at May as he struggled to puzzle out the connection with the Peculiar Crimes Unit.
‘In fact, the area of wasteland between Euston and St Pancras is set to become an entirely new London district, with new policing requirements. It represents a potentially phenomenal contribution to the national economy. I’m sure you were copied in on the estimates, Leslie. By 2020 there will be around sixty-five million passengers a year passing through the King’s Cross Interchange. That’s more than the number of passengers currently passing through Heathrow Airport. It’s a tricky balance—preventing the area from descending into chaos while so much planning and building takes place. The number of undercover police officers operating in the King’s Cross area has recently been tripled. The crack dealers and con-men who used to hang about in the streets have all been moved on. And of course after seven/seven there’s always the threat of terrorism to deal with.’
‘What about the more domestic problems? Sex workers and teenage gangs are still an issue, I believe.’
‘True, they keep trying to come back. The gangs are based in the big public housing estates that border the area, but there are special units tackling those, and they’re having considerable success. Sex workers will always appear at points where so many journeys start and end, but the clip joints are closing, which means that they don’t have anywhere to take the punters. MAGPI—the Multi-Agency Geographical Panel—meets regularly with the Safer Neighbourhood Team to discuss harm reduction strategies, and the Met uses outreach services to conduct Environmental Visual Audits to reduce anti-social behaviour. King’s Cross will never again be as run-down as it once was. Teams of architects and construction engineers have already moved into key properties bordering the site. So it’s essential not to return to the bad old days of organised crime. But there are bound to be new territorial battles in the area. As it becomes more prosperous, hard-line criminals will be trying to move back in.’
Even someone as obtuse as Faraday could sense that May was getting at something. The civil servant realised there would be no easy enjoyment of the sandwiches. He raised an enquiring eyebrow.
‘I mention this,’ said May casually, ‘because it looks like organised crime has already returned to the area. Today one of my men found a headless body in a shop on the Caledonian Road, right near the main line station.’
Faraday’s eyes widened imperceptibly. He could see himself missing the 5:45 p.m. train home from Charing Cross. ‘Your men?’ he said. ‘You don’t have any men anymore.’
‘It looks to me like a professional execution, because the head has been expertly removed. The odd part is that other identifying marks remain. There are no further injuries, so I think there’s a reasonable chance that if we find his head there’ll be a single bullet wound in it.’
‘You know that Operation Trident was set up to combat gun-related activity—’
‘—within London’s young black communities, yes, but this is different. The victim is a white man in his early to mid-thirties.’
‘What were you doing there in the first place? You have no authority—’
‘It was a coincidence. One of my detective constables happened to be working on the site.’
‘I assume you’ve turned the case straight over to Islington.’ The London Metropolitan Police did not come under Faraday’s control, and out of sight was out of mind.
‘I’m not sure whose jurisdiction the case falls under. The boundary line between the policing areas lies somewhere along the Caledonian Road. Besides, a crime like this fits our exclusive remit, Leslie, you know that.’
‘Your remit died with the closure of the division.’
‘If organised crime returns to the area, public confidence will be undermined and overseas investors will start to pull out. There are literally hundreds of buyers waiting to see how the regeneration is handled before they commit, and something like this could do a lot of damage. It’s a contract killing; the head has been cut off with the kind of professionalism you usually only get from a surgeon—or maybe the butchers in Smithfield Market. We’ll be lucky if it ever turns up at all. Maybe the killer was intending to remove the hands, but was disturbed before he could do so. The case requires special attention and the Met is simply not equipped—’
‘Neither are you,’ Faraday interrupted. ‘The unit would have to be rehoused and staff and facilities reassembled before you could touch this. No, I’m sorry, John, it’s impossible, there’s no way I can sanction it. I wouldn’t be able to without Mr Kasavian’s approval anyway, and you know how he feels about the unit. You really should never have crossed him. When you leave here, you need to report your findings to Islington, who’ll probably pass them on to SOCA. Give their officers everything you know and take them into the site at once; otherwise, I’m afraid it will be my sad duty to report you for obstruction. Pass me one of those salmon fingers, would you?’
John sank back in his chair, defeated. He knew that the only person who might be able to change the situation now was Arthur Bryant, because he had old friends in the Home Office who operated on levels above Faraday and Kasavian. He had spoken to Alma Sorrowbridge a few minutes earlier, but she had warned him that any visit would be met with a rebuff. When Bryant made up his mind, it stayed that way.
Late that afternoon, members of Islington’s Operational Command Unit turned up at number 73 Caledonian Road to remove the freezer and its grisly contents. They also took Rafi Abd al-Qaadir into custody for questioning. Despite May’s best efforts the case was lost to the Met and divisions beyond, and the PCU remained in a state of limbo.
Leslie Faraday went home with a guilty weight on his mind and chronic indigestion in his gut.