as long as he didn’t get all the nutters in Edendale phoning him up and writing him letters in green ink…
It was only when he read down to the end of the story that he discovered the writer knew far more than they ought to.
‘Police are believed to have received an anonymous letter making undisclosed allegations against the Nield family.’
How the heck had the Eden Valley Times known that?
A call to the news editor established that the paper had received a copy of the same letter that was sent to the police, and theirs had come in anonymously, too.
So it was used without checking? Was that the standard of journalism now?
‘We don’t have the staff,’ said the news editor.
Don’t have the staff? Cooper put down the phone and looked at his team of three. Join the club.
11
The pigeon park. That’s what she’d called it when she was a child. She would come here with Alice Bowskill sometimes when they were on a shopping trip in the city. The Bull Ring, New Street, and a stop off here for a sit down. The pigeon park.
In reality, it was the graveyard of St Philip’s Cathedral. Conveniently situated near shops and office blocks, it was full of people eating their sandwiches on the benches at lunchtime. Hence the pigeons. Grubby grey pests waddling about the pathways, eyeing up the public hopefully for scraps of bread.
She’d been nervous of the birds as a kid, anxious about their beaks and claws, startled by the sudden clatter of their wings. But she’d been fascinated by them too, in a way. These pigeons seemed to inhabit an entirely separate world of their own — clustering on the tallest buildings at night, stalking the parks by day. They lived apart from people, but took advantage of them when it suited. Now she could see nothing interesting about the birds at all. They were scavengers, pure and simple. They probably carried disease on their scaly feet and fleas in their feathers.
Fry looked up. She’d heard that peregrine falcons were nesting on the roof of the BT Tower these days. If falcons ate pigeons, they were welcome. A few hundreds yards away stood the West Midlands Police headquarters in Lloyd House, on Colmore Circus. The old Post and Mail building used to stand next to it, with a digital clock high on its upper storeys. The last time she’d seen it, the building was in the late stages of demolition, all the journalists having moved out to a vast open-plan newsroom at Fort Dunlop.
Fry checked her phone to make sure there was a signal. It was a habit she’d got into while she’d been living in Derbyshire. Those Peak District hills were a nightmare. But here, she was actually able to stay in touch.
She was waiting for a call to arrange a meeting place. A message had been left at her hotel this morning. An old friend wanted to offer some information. A voice from her past, another reminder of her time here in Birmingham.
On the way to St Philip’s, she’d walked through the Bull Ring and into Selfridges, ‘the boob tube’ building, the Dalek’s Ballgown, covered in fifteen thousand aluminium discs in a design inspired by a Paco Rabanne dress. She’d inhaled the smells from the food hall on the ground floor as they wafted their way up through the cat’s cradle of escalators.
For a moment, she’d paused in front of Birmingham Town Hall. Its Victorian architects had made it look like a Roman temple, with forty marble columns. Once, on a school trip, a guide had explained that those pillars were modelled on the Temple of Castor and Pollux in Rome. The Temple of Bastard and Bollocks, the kids had called it, giggling among themselves.
Anthony Gormley’s Iron Man stood nearby in Victoria Square, a twenty-foot mummy figure leaning to one side, as if rising from the tomb.
And then the call came.
‘Meet me at the old cemetery in the Jewellery Quarter Actually, there are two. Make sure it’s the southern one, Warstone Lane. There’s an entrance from Pitsford Street.’
‘A cemetery, Andy?’
‘It’s quiet at this time of day. And handy for the Metro.’
Fry ended the call and shoo’d away an inquisitive pigeon. The Jewellery Quarter had survived, then. That was a miracle. It was one of the legacies of the city’s industrial past, an area of Hockley with dealers and jewellery workshops providing a glimpse into a historic trade. Now it was a tram stop on the Metro line from Snow Hill to Wolverhampton.
There were other monuments still surviving in the city, here and there. Monuments to the 1960s, mostly. The Rotunda. The British Telecom tower. They were antiquities now, mere curiosities in the landscape, just the way that Neolithic stone circles were in the Peak District. History was a pretty elastic concept, wasn’t it? All a matter of perspective.
Fry parked her Audi on the top level of the Jewellery Quarter car park in Vyse Street. She’d found the entrance tucked between the Creative Watch Company and the premises of Regency Jewellers. From the roof level, near the top of Staircase C, she had a clear view up the street towards the exit from Jewellery Quarter Metro station. After a few minutes a train went through, then a blue-and-red Metro tram unit quietly pulled into the northbound platform.
She’d checked out the station earlier. She was confident there was only one exit. Kewley had to cross from the tram stop on a walkway over the railway lines and use the stairs or lift to reach the exit by the ticket office. He would emerge under the giant clock mechanism, near the old cast-iron street urinal that was locked and gradually filling up with rubbish. So he only had one route to choose from the station, which was to come towards her down Vyse Street, past the awnings of the gold and jewellery dealers to the corner of Pitsford Street.
The Cultural Quarter, the Jewellery Quarter, the Irish Quarter, the Convention Quarter. And now there was a designation for the Gun Quarter — and they didn’t mean Handsworth, but the industrial area around Queensway and Lancaster Circus, where traditional gun manufacturers were still based. As for the city centre, the latest Big City Plan called this ‘The Core’. A core surrounded by quarters? It was just like the planners to come up with some giant fruit metaphor.
A small trickle of people emerged from the station on to the pavement and headed off in different directions. Kewley was the last to come out. She recognized him even from this distance, even with the cap pulled over his eyes and the padded jacket to disguise his shape. There was something about the way people moved that made them recognizable whatever they wore. It took a lot of practice to disguise your body’s natural angle and rhythm.
Kewley paused in the station entrance, looked all around him carefully, pretending to check his pockets for something. An old habit, of course. It would have been enough for Fry to identify him, even without the cap.
Andy Kewley was an old street cop. He’d learned to scan every doorway and corner before he made his move. It just never occurred to him to look up.
He reached the corner of Pitsford Street near Bicknell and Sons, and turned down the side of the cemetery. Fry noticed that there was no wall or fence separating their meeting place from the street here, just a low kerb. It would be possible to enter and exit the cemetery at any point, and the row of cars parked at the kerbside would obscure her view. But Kewley continued to stroll dutifully down Pitsford Street until he came opposite a bright yellow wall, then he turned on to a path between two plane trees and entered the graveyard like a respectable citizen going about his business.
Fry knew she would lose sight of him now between the gravestones. But still she waited, watching a red Ford Fiesta and a white Transit van parked on the north side of Pitsford Street. No sign of movement.
‘Okay, then.’
She looked at her watch. Kewley was bang on time for their meeting, of course. She, on the other hand, was going to be a bit late. And that was the way she liked it.
Finally, she left the car park, walked down towards the Cafe Sovereign and stepped through the cemetery entrance. As she approached, she was assaulted by a powerful, sickly sweet smell. Some kind of white blossom on the bushes was filling the air with its aroma. She didn’t know what sort of pollinating insect it was trying so hard to
