hand. We haven’t even established that it was murder yet, and the cost! I had a look at the man-hour summaries last night, Brock. You should do the same.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen them. Let’s stick with it for a little longer, sir,’ Brock murmured. ‘Like you said, one more push.’
Kathy returned to the briefing room. The Guardian reporter was speaking to her photographer. She nodded to him and turned to leave. Kathy followed, out through the front doors and down the steps. She caught up with her on the pavement and introduced herself with a smile.
‘Gavin Lowry said to say thanks,’ Kathy said, ‘and to let him know if you need anything else.’
The reporter stared at Kathy for a moment, face blank, then raised one eyebrow and gave her a little smile. ‘You lot!’ she said. ‘You’re worse than we are. I’ve been trying to get somebody to do that to my editor for months.’
She saw the smile disappear from Kathy’s face.
‘Come on,’ the reporter said. ‘You know these old bastards need shafting.’
Kathy found Eddie Testor down in the basement carpark with Lowry and a couple of officers, waiting.
‘Is his solicitor going to take him?’ she asked.
‘No,’ one of the men said. ‘She had to go to court. We’re organising a lift in a patrol car.’
‘That’s no good. They’ll spot him straight away and tail you all the way.’
She looked at the cars parked around them and saw Lowry’s, blocking a couple of others. ‘What about it, Gavin?’ she asked. ‘We could take him in your car.’
‘I’ve got better things to do,’ he said, eyeing Testor sideways with distaste.
‘If you’re thinking of thanking the Guardian reporter, I already did it for you.’
‘Eh?’ He looked startled for a moment, then gave her a crooked smile and pulled his keys from his pocket. ‘Take him yourself if you’re that keen.’
‘All right.’ She held out her hand and he took the car key off the ring and gave it to her.
Testor looked bemused, but he followed her to the car and got in the back and lay down and let her cover him with Lowry’s raincoat and newspapers. She closed the door firmly on him and nodded to his minders.
‘Good luck,’ one of them said.
There were reporters waiting in the road that accessed the rear of the building, expecting this, but instead of turning towards them, and so out onto the high street, Kathy turned left into the narrow service lane that ran behind the primary school, then out into the residential street beyond. After a couple of minutes she checked her mirror and said, ‘All clear, Eddie. I’ll stop and let you get in the front.’
She watched him out of the corner of her eye, slowly stretching the belt across his oversize chest and shoulders. When he finally succeeded she caught the look on his face as he surveyed the garbage in the car.
‘Terrible, isn’t it? It’s not my car. Belongs to DS Lowry. What a slob.’
He didn’t say anything.
‘You two didn’t hit it off, did you? What did he say to you, at the end of the interview yesterday? Nobody else heard.’
Silence.
‘I’m not trying to trap you, Eddie. You could admit to every crime in the book in here and I wouldn’t be able to use a word of it. It’s only what you say in the station, properly witnessed, that counts. So you can relax.’
He said nothing at first and they drove on in silence, but then, as they got closer to his aunt’s house he muttered, ‘Thanks anyway.’
‘What for?’
‘You know, taking me away from there. I can’t stand them cameras. The lights and noise they make, shouting at you all the time. I can’t stand it.’
‘Don’t worry. People have a short memory. Keep out of sight and in a day or two they’ll have forgotten all about you.’
But not yet, she realised, as she turned into the court in front of Aunty Jan’s house. Distracted by the sight of the red paint, she didn’t immediately appreciate the mood of the crowd milling around the front gate. Eddie’s reaction was also slow, and they had spotted his distinctive pink skull long before he realised what was happening. Shouts went up and furious faces converged on the car, pressing against the windows as Eddie shrank from them. They closed around the rear of the car so that Kathy couldn’t reverse back onto the street, and for a moment they were motionless, the people glaring through the glass. Then the car began to rock, fists began banging on the roof, and a terrible howling noise grew from the crowd.
There was another sound too, Kathy realised, of Eddie whimpering.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said calmly, observing the distorted, almost animalistic expressions on the faces glaring in at them with a curious sense of detachment. There was no two-way radio in Lowry’s car and she didn’t think she had time to use her mobile phone. There was no sign of a uniform in the courtyard. She raised her wallet to the window by her side, showing her warrant card to the faces, but they didn’t see, or didn’t want to see.
‘Oh hell…’
She put the car into first gear, held her hand on the horn, and let out the clutch gently. Slowly, painfully slowly, the car began to inch its way forward against the bodies pressing in on it, while she prayed that the lock would be sufficient to turn in one manoeuvre.
They became angrier, realising what she was doing, and some began chanting. Then the people at the back scattered and the car was abruptly hit a jarring crunch, and Kathy saw a metal dustbin rolling away from the rear wing. Some youths were picking it up to throw it again, and now a brick landed on the bonnet, shattering into pieces and scattering the people in front. More bricks came flying in as she accelerated, and just as she reached the street the dustbin struck again, collapsing the rear windscreen into the back seat.
‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Kathy fumed as she threw the car round the corner and hurtled away. She drove over a mile before she pulled in to the kerb. Eddie was crouched beside her, his arms covering his head, sobbing.
‘It’s all right now,’ she said, aware of her heart thumping in her chest as she fumbled with the phone. ‘What about your aunt?’ she said, having almost to shout above his sobbing. ‘Eddie! Stop this! Is your aunt in there?’
‘I dunno,’ he wailed.
She stared at him. This was the thug who’d battered a car to a heap with rage, and who may yet have tipped Kerri Vlasich into the compactor. She put her hand to her left ear to block out his noise and made her report into the phone. When she was finished she took a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself.
Eddie’s head was shaking under the cover of his enormous arms. The sobbing had died away, and she heard a mumbled word. He sounded just like a terrified child.
‘What did you say, Eddie? Put your arms down and tell me.’
He mumbled something she couldn’t pick up.
‘Put your arms down, Eddie. I can’t hear what you’re saying. There’s no one around now. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’
He slowly straightened himself, head drooping on unyielding pectorals, and whispered, ‘He said that this time they’ll put me away in a special prison, where the other men will use me like a girl.’
Kathy waited, watching his head rocking from side to side. Then he added, ‘It’s just not fair. All I did was give her the ticket.’ And he burst into a flood of tears, unable to contain them any longer.
Among the debris on the floor were several packets of tissues. Kathy reached for one of them and slowly undid the wrapping and waited until the flow of tears died away.
‘Here,’ she said gently, handing the packet to him. He accepted it, and she said, ‘You’d better tell me all about it, Eddie. There’s no point going on like this.’
He sniffed and wiped and finally nodded. ‘I was just doing a favour for Mr Verdi, that’s all.’
‘You know Mr Verdi, do you?’
‘A bit,’ he said cautiously. ‘He works out at the gym. He… he’s friendly to me.’
Kathy thought that the word ‘friendly’ didn’t come out very easily. And she also remembered that Verdi had denied recognising Eddie’s picture.
‘Go on.’
‘Well, he wanted to do a favour for this girl he knew, only he didn’t want nobody to know.’
‘What sort of favour?’
‘Her mum and dad had split up, and she wanted to go and see her dad in Germany, only her mum wouldn’t let
