She sighed and sat. There was no help for it. Unlike her mother, who’d grown up expecting to be fed and cared for by other people, her father had a deep-seated need to look after people in a concrete way. Conversation was impossible without acquiescence.
The sandwich, she saw, was thick ham, with cheddar and pickle, and once she took a bite she realized she was ravenous. The milk was perfect, smooth, cold, and creamy, and by the time she’d finished both, she thought she could speak without shaking. While she ate, Ivan had made a pot of tea. He sat down across from her and poured for them both. “Now, what’s all this about?” he said.
In the taxi, she’d thought of all sorts of beginnings, but now she simply said, “Dad, how do you know Denis Childs?”
“Ah.” He studied her over the top of his cup, assessing. It suddenly occurred to Melody that her father and Denis were much alike, two big men who moved with unexpected grace. Two men, near the same age, who handled power and position with intelligence and moral integrity. “I wondered if you might ask,” said Ivan, settling back to tell a story, cradling his delicate china cup in his large hands. “I’d moved up to a desk at the paper, you see, but I couldn’t resist getting out in the street with a camera when things were going on. It was Notting Hill Carnival in, let’s see, it would have been 1994. Things turned ugly. Some white thugs taunted a group protesting Stephen Lawrence’s murder. One of the protesters stood up to them, then went to the aid of an injured bystander. I got a great shot—front-page worthy—but I never published it.” He shook his head, his gaze abstracted by the memory. “I couldn’t have said why. Something wasn’t right. The guy didn’t feel like a protester to me. Too decisive, too much in command under pressure.
“I didn’t think much more about it until a few years later. I recognized him as the DCI handling the press conference for a high-profile murder case. I made a point to have a chat, afterwards.” Ivan shrugged his big shoulders. “We’ve kept up over the years, Denis and I. Never publicly, you understand.”
No, of course not, thought Melody. Ivan had always avoided public alliances. He said they kept him from saying what needed to be said. “How did you know, when Denis was attacked?” she asked.
“Tom Faith called me.”
Melody nodded. She should have known that, too.
“I thought it was an unlikely mugging,” Ivan went on. “And that perhaps your lot should look into it.” His Geordie accent came out strong and deliberate.
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
Ivan grinned. “The paper can’t be involved.”
Melody couldn’t help smiling back. “You’re Machiavellian, you know that?”
Ivan sobered. “Maybe so. As is our chief superintendent, but maybe this time he was a bit too Machiavellian for his own good. What’s happened? I’ve heard nothing from hospital.”
Melody told him, starting, haltingly, with Ryan Marsh’s part in the St. Pancras protest, with his disappearance and their discovery of his hideout, and of how he’d given them information that had led them to the killer in that case. The tremor came back to her hands as she told him about Ryan’s death, and how for the past months she’d lived with thinking he’d shot himself, that they’d all somehow failed him.
Ivan Talbot was a good listener. He let her start and stop, not interrupting, watching her with no sign of impatience. She struggled to put the events of the last week—less than a week—into a linear form. There had been Kincaid’s meeting with Denis and Denis’s subsequent attack, Kincaid’s growing certainty, confirmed by Rashid, that Ryan’s death had been murder and that Denis had been deliberately targeted. Then, the discovery that Ryan Marsh was somehow linked with Angus Craig. Ivan’s eyebrows rose at that, but still he didn’t interrupt.
“Doug and I figured out what you could have told us,” she said with no small annoyance. “That Denis was undercover, probably for Special Branch.” When Ivan merely nodded, she went on. “Then a body turned up in the Regent’s Canal, but the guy’s fingerprints didn’t match his ID and his prints said he was a cop. Not a very good one, either. He had the records gap that indicated undercover work, but he also had a history of violent behavior and had disappeared altogether in the last few years.”
“Do you have a photo?” Ivan asked, surprising her.
Melody took out her mobile, pulled up the photo of Michael Stanton, and handed it across.
Ivan studied it with a frown. “It was years ago, but I’d swear this is the man who threw the bottle that day at Carnival, the one who injured the bystander. He was convincing, I can tell you. I’d no idea he was a cop. Special Branch must have put spies into both camps. The tension over the Lawrence murder was explosive.”
“We think Angus Craig was their handler. They were all connected. Then, Duncan found—” Melody stopped, pulling the edges of her cardigan tight across her chest. She’d managed to talk about Ryan’s death—his murder, even—but this, she wasn’t sure she could say. Her dad waited. She sipped her cooling tea, swallowed, managed to go on. “Duncan found a witness who saw Ryan Marsh with Stanton—this guy”—she tapped her mobile—“in Angus Craig’s village on the night the Craigs died. I don’t think—I can’t think—that Ryan was responsible. But we believe that the Craigs were murdered, too. We started to wonder who didn’t want Angus Craig to go to trial, and what Denis knew, or might have learned that last night, from Angus Craig.”
“I would back up,” Ivan said thoughtfully, “and ask who put your undercover cop into the protest group that was causing trouble for development in King’s Cross.”
Spoken, Melody thought, like a true journalist. “We got there, in the end.” She looked her father in the eyes. She could quit here. She could walk away. If she told him, what would she be getting him into? What damage might it do to both her parents? And to the paper? Was it worth the risk?
But she knew, from the expression on his face, that she’d already gone too far. Ivan Talbot wouldn’t stop now. Here was a story to rival the biggest of his career. And the safety of a man he considered a friend was at stake.
“We think,” said Melody, “that it was Deputy Assistant Commissioner Trent.” And then she told him why.
He slept, uneasily. They had cut off his sedation, but he still felt fragmented, unanchored. His head ached, and his dreams left him sweating. When he woke, he fretted over the things he couldn’t remember. He knew he’d met Duncan at the pub. He remembered walking to Roger Street. He remembered talking at the table. He remembered leaving. And after that, a blank.
They’d told him where and how he’d been found. Had he been watched and followed? he wondered now. Or had someone known his route and lain in wait? Had he compromised Duncan? His wife kept assuring him that Duncan was fine, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d unleashed havoc on more than himself.