‘The bloke whose shoes I threw up on in the khazi, you could ask him for starters.’
‘He have a name?’
‘Jimmy. Jimmy something-or-other.’
‘I thought it was your local. Regular, anyway.’
‘So ask the landlord, why don’t you?’
‘We already did. Said he remembers you coming in, not leaving.’
‘Makes the two of us, then.’
‘No memory of seeing you after ‘round eleven, eleven thirty.’
‘Like I said, it was busy. Wall to wall.’
‘Leave there the right side of midnight, cab across London, Hampstead in forty minutes, tops. Half an hour.’
‘And why’d I want to do that?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I don’t know, do I?’
‘Keep the appointment your daughter had made with Petru Andronic.’
‘You’re joking. You are joking.’
‘Teach him a lesson.’
‘No way.’
‘You’d already warned him what would happen if he tried to see Sasha again. And there he was, going behind your back. Getting his hands on your daughter. This — what did you call him? — drug-dealing little shite. And by the way, why drug-dealing?’
‘Why? Cause it’s what they do, isn’t it? Not the Poles, the Poles are okay, they know how to do a day’s work. Not now, mind you, they’ve clocked the writing on the wall an’ buggered off back to Warsaw an’ wherever else it is they come from. No, it’s the rest of them. Your Bosnians and Albanians, Moldovans and fucking Romanians. Breed like fucking rats, those Romanian bloody gyppos worst of all, just so’s they can send the kids out on the streets, begging. Soon as they’re old enough the girls are out whoring and kids like that Andronic are peddling drugs on street corners. All that on top of milking Social fucking Security.’
‘The world,’ Costello said, ‘according to the British National Party.’
‘Laugh, you smug bastard,’ Martin said. ‘Go ahead. One day you’ll be laughing on the other side of your cocky little face.’
‘Maybe that’s what it was,’ Karen said, reclaiming the conversation. ‘With Andronic. The chance to teach him his place, teach him a lesson. Only it went too far — you’d been drinking after all — got out of hand. Next thing you know …’
Martin rocked his chair back then forward. ‘No, you had the least bit of evidence put me near where it happened, you’d have had me in cuffs the minute I stepped off that plane. But you’ve got sod all and you’re fishing. That’s what this is. Only the line’s broke, and, any case, you wanna hook me you best get yourself some better fuckin’ bait — so I’m leaving. You want to stop me, arrest me. If not, I’m gone.’
And with neither Karen nor Costello making any attempt to stop him, he walked out the door.
16
‘What d’you reckon then?’ Ramsden said. ‘Martin?’
‘Do I fancy him for it?’ Karen said.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’d like to. Like to, but I don’t know.’
They were standing at the side door of a pub Ramsden favoured in the bowels of Camden. A fine view of the waste bins and a few parked cars. Ramsden, as he sometimes did, smoking one of his small tightly rolled cigars. Their breath visible on the night air.
It had been an Irish pub when Irish was more in vogue, plastic shamrocks in the window, a greenwood bodhran hanging down above the bar; this last year or so, evenings and weekends, it had been taken over by Goths and heavy metallers; Black Sabbath and Metallica on the jukebox and whip-thin girls with faces powdered white and lipstick the colour of dried blood. Other coppers never set foot there, unless it was a raid. The bitter wasn’t bad, either.
‘Trouble is,’ Karen said, ‘there’s not a scrap of forensics puts him even close. No murder weapon, no prints, no CCTV. Nothing.’
‘Gut feeling?’
‘My gut feeling, he could have. He’s capable of it, I’m sure. Reason enough in his mind, too, tanked up especially.’
‘So what you gonna do? You and sonny boy?’
‘Sonny boy’s all right. Just needs a little perspective, that’s all. Realise he doesn’t have to be grandstanding all the time.’
‘I’m sure in your guiding hands …’ A lascivious grin on his face, Ramsden was cheerfully miming masturbation when the door opened sharply and a sandy-haired man took half a step out on to the low porch, stopped, looked from Ramsden to Karen and back again, then winked merrily at Ramsden and withdrew.
‘Thinks there’s something going on,’ Ramsden said. ‘You and me. Didn’t want to spoil my chances.’
‘Yes?’ Karen laughed. ‘What chance is that?’
Ramsden took a healthy sip from his glass.
‘So, Martin, what’s your plan?’
‘Sonny boy, as you call him, is going back to the landlord at the Four Hands, dredge up some more names, try to get a sharper line on how long that night Martin was in the pub. Then we’re checking taxi firms, minicab drivers, anyone who might have had Martin as a fare. And that includes the driver he alleges took him home in the early hours.’
‘Could have been a mate, a friend.’
‘I know. I can get some of the team talking to his known associates, see if there’s anything there.’
Ramsden’s look was dubious. ‘Lot of manpower, lot of hours.’
‘Better suggestion?’
‘Bring him in. Make him sweat. Then see what he’s got to say. Let me have a word with him.’
Karen smiled. ‘Is that the bit where you swipe him round the back of the head with a good old-fashioned telephone directory?’
‘Does the trick. Used to.’
‘So I’ve heard.’
Ramsden swallowed down the last of his beer. ‘Want another?’
‘Maybe. Just the one. But now you’ve finished that vile little cigar, can we at least go back inside?’
They found a table far enough from the jukebox to make conversation possible. Hector Prince, Ramsden said, was still lording it over the fact that he’d walked away from police custody scot-free, bragging about it, apparently, how there was nothing they could do to touch him.
‘Riding for a fall?’ Karen wondered.
‘Could be.’
‘How about that accusation of Martin’s?’ Ramsden asked. ‘The Andronic youth might have been dealing?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Gives you another possible motivation. If he’d been siphoning some off, short changing, someone might have been out to teach him a lesson.’
‘Some lesson.’
‘Sets an example.’
‘There’s nothing else linking Andronic to drugs. I think that was just Martin blowing off hot air.’
‘Even so,’ Ramsden winced as a particularly loud riff from Iron Maiden made the room shake and rattled the
