with only a faint glimmer of candlelight shining up the stairwell from below. For the first minute or so, Acland could only hear the murmur of conversation in the room behind him, but as his eye adjusted to the darkness his ears adjusted similarly to the low-level noise in the rest of the house. The hum of women’s voices was audible from the kitchen – one louder and more petulant in tone than the rest – but he couldn’t make out what any of them was saying. Less expected was the muted rasp of a throat being inadequately cleared in the room directly opposite him across the small rectangular landing.
Wondering if it was a trick of tinnitus, he turned his head to listen with his good ear. This time the sound was quite distinct. Whoever was in there was trying to contain a smoker’s cough by holding on to phlegm for as long as possible until the need to expel it produced an involuntary spasm. There was nothing to indicate gender – the rasp was a toneless guttural – but, as no light was escaping from under the door and Acland could think of no reason for a woman to sit in total darkness for fear of drawing attention to herself, his instinct said it was a man.
He crossed his arms in front of him and continued to wait.
*
Jackson shook her head in annoyance as they returned to the car. ‘Mags couldn’t tell me anything about Chalky and didn’t like it when I said she needs to exercise and lose weight. Her heart’s as strong as an ox. The only thing wrong with her is that she’s fat, forty and flatulent, and Avril wants to keep her that way.’ ‘She looked pretty sick to me.’ ‘So would you if you never saw the daylight and your partner kept stuffing your face with burgers and chips,’ Jackson retorted grimly. ‘That is one
‘God knows. Companionship . . . self-esteem . . . a misplaced maternal instinct. The best thing Mags could do is walk out now and return to wherever she came from.’ Irritably, Jackson snapped the locks on the BMW. ‘Avril’s a classic controller. She manipulates people by giving them what they want. Like Ben’s mother. That’s the way
‘You didn’t take to Avril, then?’
Jackson gave a grunt of amusement as she opened the boot and put her case into it. ‘I wouldn’t trust her further than I could throw her. Would you?’
‘No,’ said Acland with a hint of irony as he opened the driver’s door for her and stood back, gesturing for her to climb in, ‘but I don’t know the first damn thing about women.’
Jackson arched a sardonic eyebrow. ‘You don’t know much about this one. Do I look as if I can’t open a car door for myself?’
He stepped back immediately. ‘Sorry. Force of habit.’
‘The last man who insisted on treating me like a piece of Dresden china was my grandfather,’ she said idly, taking off her jacket and tossing it on to the back seat. ‘I was sixteen years old and taller than he was, but he decided I should find out just once in my life how it felt to be treated like a lady. He made a big deal of helping me into his clapped-out Peugeot.’
‘Sorry.’
She put her foot on the sill and rested an arm along the top of the door. ‘He told me lesbians lead miserable existences, particularly the masculine-looking ones. People snigger at them behind their backs.’
Acland stared doggedly over her shoulder, wondering where this was leading. ‘Is he eating his words now?’ he asked cautiously.
‘I wish he was. He died a couple of years later. It’s one of the reasons I went into medicine. He had a perfectly treatable disease that went undiagnosed because his GP was a moron and the waiting lists were so long. Colon cancer,’ she explained. ‘By the time the poor old boy was referred to a specialist, it was too late.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, lowering herself on to the seat. ‘He was definitely one of the good guys.’ She fired the ignition and gestured towards the passenger side. ‘Are you getting in?’
Acland shook his head. ‘I’ll make my own way back.’
Jackson studied him for a moment. ‘Any particular reason why you don’t want to drive with me suddenly?’
‘I could do with the exercise.’
She smiled slightly. ‘You shouldn’t make eye contact when you tell a fib, Lieutenant. That stare of yours is a lot more expressive than you think.’ But she didn’t try to persuade him out of whatever he was planning to do. With a brief nod, she slammed the door and engaged her gears.
As she drove away, she watched in her rear-view mirror as he crossed to the opposite pavement and set off back towards the squat.
Eighteen
THE NEWS, LATE ON Wednesday afternoon, that Walter Tutting had emerged from his coma was greeted with relief by the inquiry team. Progress on Kevin Atkins’s mobile had been painfully slow. The last incoming call, prior to Jackson’s, was from a pay phone at Waterloo station, and a half-hearted hope that the booth might produce results so many weeks later was quickly shattered when information came through that it was cleaned daily. Jones refused to authorize a forensic examination. ‘We might as well dig a hole and pour money into it,’ he said grimly.
Over sixty entries in the address book had been followed up without success. The majority of contacts were friends, family or business acquaintances, most of whom had been interviewed and dismissed at the time of Atkins’s murder. Of the remainder, fifteen, including three male prostitutes, all ex-army, had since accounted for themselves.
Four names remained to be checked but in each case the user’s mobile number had been disconnected. They were logged under the single-word tags of ‘Mickey’, ‘Cass’, ‘Sam’ and ‘Zoe’, but with no ideas of possible surnames from the Atkins family, the team was waiting on a data-search of the server’s files, with a warning that results could take days if multiple servers were involved. Even then, there was a good chance the numbers had been registered to companies, which would involve further time-consuming interviews.
