sound.
Getting nothing, he lifted his head and said, ‘Anyone there?’
Amazingly, there was.
Brilliant lights dazzled him, and a voice blared through a loudhailer, ‘Armed police! Don’t move.’
22
‘Is that it?’ Jack Gull said.
In the yard at Bath Central police station, a van used for transporting prisoners had backed up to the entrance. The rear doors were open, but the grille remained in place. Alone inside, a slight, scruffy man, his clothes coated in mud, sat with his hands cuffed behind him. He looked dirtier, but otherwise no different from the drunks who are brought in any night of the week. Red-eyed, unshaven, not much over twenty, he stared past Gull as if he didn’t exist. His expression wasn’t defiant, or angry, or resigned. It was indifferent.
Anticlimax was about to ruin the night.
Gull had come in specially for his moment of triumph. Fireworks and a fanfare were in order. For while it was Peter Diamond who had detained the man, the major credit had to be chalked up to Supergull for setting up the operation. All the planning was down to the Serial Crimes Unit. As for Diamond, he’d been called in only as a stopgap. He wouldn’t have played any part if Gull hadn’t needed a break after five hours on watch. The silly arse hadn’t even armed himself, or the arrest would have been routine instead of the pantomime it had become.
The tacky circumstances of the arrest did take a little of the glory away. One of the firearms team had gone to relieve himself behind the police line and thought he heard a distant voice down by the river. A small detachment had been sent to investigate and found a large man face down on the river bank. Only after a minute or so did someone spot the second man underneath. His struggles had turned the spongy turf into a mudbath and it was difficult to see where the mud ended and the man began. One man face down can be assumed to be blind drunk, ill or dead; two, in that position, looked like consenting adults. Only on close examination had it been discovered that this was a senior police officer in charge of a suspect.
‘Who is he?’ Gull asked the sergeant who had come in with the van.
‘He hasn’t said.’
‘What did he say when we nicked him?’
‘Nothing, guv. He hasn’t spoken a word yet.’
‘We’ll soon alter that. Didn’t Diamond get anything out of him?’
‘He said not.’
‘Prick.’ It wasn’t clear whether Gull was speaking of the prisoner or his esteemed colleague. ‘Bring him in, then. Let’s see what the custody sergeant gets out of him.’
He stood well back while the grille was unlocked. The suspect was plucked from the van by a couple of PCs not over-concerned about his safe progress down the steps and into the bowels of Manvers Street. As every prisoner discovers, descending from a police van while handcuffed isn’t easy. He stumbled more than once on his way to the desk where a sergeant waited who had seen it all so many times that boredom had set in.
‘Hold it. I don’t want your filth all over my desk. Name?’
The prisoner said nothing.
‘I need your name, sunshine.’
He wasn’t even making eye contact.
‘Do you hear what I’m saying? Give him a prod. See if he’s awake.’
The prod had no result.
‘You’re not going to be difficult, are you?’ the custody sergeant said. ‘If I decide you’re not in a fit state to be dealt with, I’m within my rights to put you in a cell until such time as you start acting sensibly. Let’s try again.’
The try was unsuccessful.
‘Has he been searched? Anything on him with his name on it?’
The sergeant who had brought the man in said no form of ID had been found.
All this procedure was too much for Jack Gull. His patience snapped. ‘Take his fucking prints and get them checked. And we’ll need his shoes as well, for forensics. What’s he wearing? Are they trainers, or what?’
The prisoner’s footwear was so covered in mud it was impossible to tell.
While the man was hustled away to have his shoes removed and hands washed for the fingerprinting, Gull said to the custody sergeant, ‘I’m not taking any more shit from this fuckhead. He’s given us enough already.’
‘Leave it to me, guv. I’ll deal with him.’
‘Okay, I take the hint.’
‘Will you tell the press we’ve nicked him?’
‘You bet — and rub their noses in it. All the bollocks they’ve given us about no progress.’
‘They’re sure to ask who he is.’
‘No problem. They won’t expect to be told his fucking name, not until we’ve charged him. There’s a man helping us with our inquiries, period.’
23
This morning I picked a moment to look through the invoice book. Every transaction is there, names and addresses of sender and recipient, the messages that go on the little cards, and how much the client paid and whether it was cash or card. Sally sometimes asks me to mind the shop while she slips out for ten minutes to buy two takeout cappuccinos at the shop up the street.
This was my opportunity.
It’s stuffed with famous names and intimate messages, that little book. You could sell it to one of the Sunday papers for a small fortune.
I won’t reveal the senders’ names, but you’ll have heard of them, believe me. I was dying to read on, but if I got too interested, Sally would be back with the cappuccinos before I found what I wanted. I was looking for one delivery on a particular Saturday in June because I remembered it was my birthday and I had a date that evening and wanted to get the job done in time to get to the hairdresser’s.
I thumbed through the pages and found it.
John Smith?
The others were going to jump all over me.
I was so blown away that this was his real name that I still had the book open in my hands when Sally came back holding two coffees.
I froze.
She was like, ‘Have you taken an order?’
I snapped the book shut and felt myself go bright red. ‘No, I was trying to remember the name of one of our clients in Blahblah Avenue.’
‘John Smith?’
‘That’s him.’
Sally, bless her, was as calm as a midwife. ‘Nice man. Always buys his wife something to pin on her frock. Well, I assume they’re married. They act as if they are.’
And I’m, ‘You know them, then?’
‘Not really.’
‘Do they come in together?’
‘Not in the shop. I’ve seen them somewhere. Where was it? A Christmas concert in the Guildhall, I think. She’s rather gorgeous, tall, dark-haired, in her thirties.’
