Death Row

Delaney leaned on the doorbell again and looked at his watch. He guessed Gloria could be anywhere, and in a city the size of London he had as much chance of finding her without a mobile phone as he had of finding a winning lottery ticket. He hastily scrawled a phone number on a piece of paper with the words There’s a hundred pounds’ credit on it below it. He pushed the mobile phone he had just bought her through her letter box and the note after it. He ran back down the stairs to Sally, who was waiting in the car, turning up his collar against the rain and totally oblivious to the pair of eyes that were watching him from across the street. Angry eyes.

*

Several hours later and Jack Delaney put his hand on the cold glass of the window and looked out of the CID office at the car park beyond. It was dark outside now. The neon lighting overhead in the office was flickering and doing little to alleviate the headache that had been building since early that morning. He opened his desk drawer and brought out a jumbo-sized bottle of Advil that he had brought back from a trip to America. He put a couple of the tablets in his mouth and swallowed them dry. Rattling the few remaining pills in the tub and putting it back in the drawer. The car park was about half full. Some people coming in on shift. Some others leaving. All spare hands had been called to the pump but so far the hunt for the missing boy had proved fruitless. The boy’s father had finally phoned home – his mobile phone battery had run out – and was even now driving back to England. He’d make it by morning and Delaney prayed to God that someone would have some good news for him by then. Not that He ever listened to him. Or if He did He showed no signs of it.

Delaney looked across at the muted television hanging on the wall across the office. Sky News had been rolling the story all day long, alternating between pictures of Melanie Jones, her injured cameraman, Peter Garnier, and the missing boy and his desperately grieving mother. Making a link between them all but with no explanation to offer. Delaney didn’t entirely blame them. He too was sure there was a link between them all, he just couldn’t for the life of him see what it was. The degenerate slug Garnier had got that right at least, Delaney thought: his job was indeed to see how things fitted together. Find the pattern and you can work out what happens next. Find the links and he might work out who had taken the boy, and, more importantly, work out where he had been taken. Work it out in time.

Delaney picked up a half-finished cup of coffee and took a swallow of the cold liquid. What he really needed was a drink. He looked at the flashing cursor on his computer screen and switched the machine to standby. He wasn’t going to find any clues looking at his computer, he was pretty damn sure of that. He picked his jacket off the back of his chair, shrugged into it, and walked across the office to another desk, where Tony Bennett was sitting at a computer looking at CCTV footage from various cameras in Camden Town.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

Bennett looked up at him, rubbing sore eyes. ‘You know how it is. We coppers used to wear out shoe leather, now it’s repetitive-strain injuries and gallons of eyewash.’

Delaney grunted. ‘I know how that works.’

Bennett gestured at the computer monitor. ‘Britain is the most surveilled country in the world. More CCTV cameras per capita than any other country on the planet – for all the bleeding good it does.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Delaney, watching the screen as a drunken twenty-something-year-old woman staggered along the pavement, wobbling on high platform heels and finishing a can of cider which she tossed into the gutter. ‘There’s been a real crackdown on litterbugs.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘You want to call it a day? Come down to the annexe, get acquainted with the most important people you need to know.’

Bennett looked up again, puzzled. ‘Annexe? Which people?’

‘Bar staff, Tony. Our local, The Pig and Whistle – it’s just around the corner.’

‘The Pig and Whistle. You are kidding me?’

Delaney put a cigarette in his mouth without lighting it. ‘I don’t kid. Not when it comes to serious matters like your local boozer. I take it you do drink?’

Bennett stood up to swing his own jacket off the back of his chair. ‘You take it right.’

As he slipped into his jacket, behind him on the monitor Jamil Azeez walked into shot, stopping beside a lamp- post and pulling out a packet of cigarettes. A young woman with dark hair and quasi-goth clothing approached to talk to him. He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her, she walked off and Jamil put a cigarette in his own mouth and lit it.

Bennett turned back and paused the footage.

‘Hang on, Jack, this is my man.’

Delaney looked at his watch. ‘As I understand it, he’s not going anywhere.’

‘True, but I’ll just see how this pans out. Catch you down there.’

‘Sure.’ Delaney headed to the door, slapping a hand on the shoulder of Jimmy Skinner, who was dealing with a pile of paperwork and sketching a farewell wave over his shoulder as Bennett called after him.

‘Make mine a pint.’

Bennett turned back to the computer monitor and clicked the cursor to play the streaming footage again. Jamil was clearly in shot: the light overhead and spilling from the shops behind made it a very clear picture.

Jamil Azeez lit his cigarette, nervously flicking the lighter a few times and shaking it to get it to work. His hands seemed to tremble as he took a few quick puffs. Bennett couldn’t tell if it was because of the cold or if he was nervous about something. He certainly wasn’t dressed for the weather: jeans and a shirt.

Bennett pushed play again and after a moment or two on the screen a young white man, early twenties by the looks of him, walked over to Jamil and raised his hands, shouting something in his face. Jamil stepped back, clearly distressed, and Bennett didn’t blame him. The white man was solidly built and was wearing tight jeans, a green bomber jacket and a skinhead haircut. A tattoo at the nape of his neck, just visible through the hair on the back of his head, read B-.

Jamil threw down his cigarette and hurried away. The man turned in profile, watching him, his handsome face now ugly with anger. Then he walked out of shot in the same direction.