‘Only that he worked at St Mary’s with her, that he was due home any minute.’ I shrugged. ‘No one wants their sexual history broadcast to a partner.’
‘Says the expert.’ There was a trace of malice in his voice but it was habitual, half-hearted. We were wiped out from a night spent cramped together in the car. From catching two additional deaths, Cherry and whoever the blood patch belonged to, in as many days. I kept thinking of the splintered door in Cherry’s room. I couldn’t help but wonder how far behind her killer we’d been, and what she’d seen that had put an end to her life so violently.
Now, the blood in the Midland was a piece of the puzzle that didn’t seem to match anything else. It had been confirmed as human, and forensics estimated the quantity soaked into the carpet as four to six pints. Comfortably enough to kill someone. It looked as though the body had been dissected, and disposed of through the drains. Not all of it could have gone that way, though, and it added new frustration to our not fully investigating the first two dustbin fires.
We had to know who died in that room.
We had staggered towards one answer, though. Ross Browne was the smiling man. I wondered what had happened after his relationship with Amy Burroughs disintegrated to make him go so far off the grid, to hide his identity, and what it was that had finally caught up with him now. There was a knock at the door and I got up. Opened it to a young, uniformed officer with neck acne and a large coffee stain on his shirt.
‘Detective Constable Waits?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re wanted on the top floor. Superintendent Parrs …’
Sutty groaned and got to his feet. ‘Yeurgh, yeurgh,’ he said.
‘Not you, sir,’ said the officer, returning his gaze gravely to me. ‘Just him.’ I pulled on my jacket, it felt about as crumpled as I did, and I wondered, tiredly, if this would be another warning. The death threats against me were starting to feel more like a petition.
Either way, I was going to have to talk to him.
There was a strange man in the midst of all this tracing my movements, watching my house and calling my phone. His comment to Sian was the tipping point, though. An oblique threat against my sister was too much of an escalation to ignore. The officer didn’t speak again until he knocked on the Superintendent’s door and took me inside.
‘Detective Constable Waits, sir,’ he said, without looking at either one of us.
His voice was shaking.
‘Very good,’ said Parrs. The officer backed out of the room and drew the door shut. The office itself was uncharacteristically chaotic. Papers had been pushed off the desk on to the floor, and the two chairs which usually sat opposite the Superintendent were tipped on to their sides, looking as though they’d been thrown against the wall. Parrs was sitting, rigid, behind the desk, grey suit, grey hair, grey face. His tie was askew at his neck, and his raw, red eyes flicked about the room, as if inviting me to observe its disarray, before settling on mine. ‘Take a seat,’ he said with his shark’s smile. His Scottish accent was just a low growl. I picked up one of the chairs, set it back on its legs and sat down.
‘At around six o’clock this morning, GMT, the MAN–DXB non-stop to the United Arab Emirates touched down in Dubai International Airport. It’s a seven-hour flight but had the wind at its back, so it landed a little ahead of schedule. Ever been to Dubai, Aidan?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Dry country,’ he said. ‘Not really your style, eh? I’m told it’s the busiest airport in the world operating on just two runways. Needless to say, being ahead of schedule can present a headache in such cramped confines. Ground crews started to process the luggage.’ He smiled again. ‘That can be a bit of a headache there, too. Dubai International has what’s generally acknowledged to be the most state-of-the-art surveillance system for incoming drugs of any airport on the planet. Makes Heathrow look like a fucking honesty box. Obviously, the travellers themselves get finger-fucked through security, but it’s behind the scenes where the real magic happens. Those unloaded bags are screened, re-screened, sniffer-dogged, you name it. A girl with half a gram of ketamine only just avoided the firing squad last year on appeal. Big risk to take carry-on. So I was surprised to receive a call this morning from the British embassy, saying that a thirty-six-year-old man from my city had been optimistic enough to think he could take a bag of the good stuff on holiday. I was less surprised when they told me his name. A Mr …’ Parrs pretended to read from the sheet of paper. ‘… Oliver Cartwright. No, it all started to make sense once they told me his name. It started to look almost elegant.’ Somehow, in my plot against Cartwright, I hadn’t quite thought ahead to this confrontation. Parrs lowered his head and looked at me. ‘Does it make sense to you, Aidan? Does it start to look elegant?’
‘No, sir.’
‘No, sir,’ he laughed. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him laugh before. ‘No, sir. You told me to stay away from him on pain of death and I followed orders, because I’m Aidan Waits and that’s what I do. I wouldn’t take a personal vendetta and turn it into an international incident, would I?’ He paused, breathing through his nose for a few seconds. ‘It will, no doubt, give you great pleasure to hear that Mr Oliver Cartwright will, for the next few years, be engaged in a miasma of legal proceedings, in a second language, which will more than likely see him imprisoned abroad for the rest of his life. The sex-tapes in his future will be of an altogether different variety. Do you think that punishment fits the crime, Detective Constable?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘You’re a cold fish, son, has anyone ever told you that? At this moment in time, a latex-gloved Arab is wearing Ollie Cartwright like a fucking wristwatch. Have you got anything to say to that?’
‘Good,’ I answered.
He stared at me. ‘There was a time when I thought you might be useful to me. I’d turn that chilly disposition loose on to the people who deserved it. You needed to keep your head down a bit after your last disaster, but some time spent with Inspector Sutcliffe could take care of that. Maybe it’d even give you a few lessons in what not to do. I think I made a mistake, though. I think there’s too much missing from you.’ He let that sink in for a minute. ‘Cartwright’s going nowhere. Fuck him. But you and I trusted each other once. Tell me what happened here. And make it good, eh? Make it fucking brilliant.’
‘I don’t know anything about it, sir.’
‘Playing dumb? Well, they say the best lies always have some truth in them. Who’d believe the most amoral man on the force would grow a conscience over some teenage tart spreading them for a guy off TV?’ He looked at me, his red eyes stabbing into mine. ‘I’d believe it, though, wouldn’t I, Aidan? I’d believe you’ve got a soft spot in that direction. I’d believe you can lie through your teeth for months on end and rip off everyone around you. I’d believe anything but you sitting there telling me that you don’t know how a bag of weapons-grade cocaine ended up in Cartwright’s suitcase.’