‘This’ll strike you as odd, Kathy,’ Brock continued, as the ambulance swayed down the motorway, ‘but for some extraordinary reason he decided to check with Hornchurch Street, and then with me, before he did anything.’ But his sarcasm was lost on her, he realised, lying there pale and withdrawn, and he decided to save it for later.
Actually, Leon Desai had already phoned Brock before Lowry’s message came in. Kathy wasn’t answering her phone at home, and her mobile number was reporting a fault. He just wondered if Brock knew that she was all right. Kathy didn’t react to that either, so Brock said no more.
At West Essex General they gave her immediate treatment for her damaged arm and face, and decided to keep her in for observation for the night.
The following day Brock picked her up and took her to Hornchurch Street where she made a full statement to him and a senior woman police officer, and then disappeared from sight.
The Christmas Day shifts were staffed mainly by men and women who either had no family to spend this special day with, like Brock and now Lowry, or else found it so stressful that they were pleased to volunteer for work. For those involved, clearing up after Kathy’s spectacular mess was a welcome chore.
There was Verdi to be arrested, on the basis of hard evidence at last, both the collection of sickeningly graphic tapes which were discovered in Jackson’s holdall, taken from Speedy’s house, and also the forensic traces they found in the octagonal room. And then there was the question of the girls, Naomi and Lisa. The fact that their testimony was no longer required either to incriminate Verdi or explain the fate of Speedy, Wiff and Kerri Vlasich raised something of a quandary. The only concrete evidence of their illicit drug business in the food court was their own confessions, and confessions could be retracted, especially by the young and vulnerable. How much effort was worth expending to make charges stick? Naomi’s grandmother seemed to have worked this out for herself when Brock spoke to her later on Christmas Day.
‘If it weren’t for the money,’ she said cautiously, ‘we might almost be prepared to forgive our Naomi. But you can’t just turn a blind eye to nearly forty thousand quid, now can you, Chief Inspector?’
Brock agreed that that was a problem.
‘I mean, we might say that Jack had had a windfall at the dogs, and it was nothing to do with Naomi at all. We might say that, but we’d never be able to take advantage of it, not knowing what we do. But supposing…’
She paused and looked wistfully at the little portrait gallery of her drug-blighted family on the wall.
‘Yes?’ Brock asked sympathetically.
‘Well, supposing it were given away, to a good cause, something to do with drug rehabilitation or something, as a memorial to Naomi’s poor mum, who passed away on this very day two years ago.’
‘Ah. Interesting thought,’ Brock said, scratching his beard.
‘Do you think so, Mr Brock? Do you really think so?’
Brock promised to consider it. In a few years, he thought, Naomi would have Nathan Tindall’s job, or own a satellite TV company, and he had no desire to blight the future career of such a promising young capitalist.
Late on Boxing Day, Brock sat down in front of the roaring gas fire with a cold snack and a bottle of excellent red, and resisted the impulse, yet again, to phone Suzanne. Instead he picked up the little book that she had brought for him, which he had not yet opened. Emile Zola, he read, turning over the fly-leaf; Au Bonheur des Dames, or The Ladies’ Paradise, 1861.
He closed it again and took a sip of the red, the same as the one Kathy had brought. It was difficult to concentrate on anything else. If it was closure you wanted, he thought, it was closure Kathy gave you. All the villains dead or sorted. Everything resolved-except, of course, Kathy herself.
Leon Desai, whom she had refused to see during the medical procedures and debriefing on Christmas Day, had turned up in some agitation on Brock’s doorstep this morning, thinking she must be sheltering there. But after accepting a Christmas drink and some words of advice he had returned to his parents’ home none the wiser.
After he had gone, Brock had driven over to Finchley and taken the lift to the twelfth floor of the block of flats where Kathy lived. Her neighbour, Mrs P, stuck her head out of her front door when she heard the key in Kathy’s lock, and Brock had given her a bottle of gift-wrapped port which he said Kathy had asked him to give her. She would be away for a while, he had explained, if Mrs P wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on her flat.
Inside the flat he had found the credit card statement from the bank, with its accompanying letter warning that her limit had now been exceeded. He had put it into his pocket and returned to his car, where he wrote out a cheque and put it into an envelope with the payment slip and posted it on the way back.
He gave a little start as the phone at his elbow began to ring.
‘Hello, David.’
‘Suzanne! How are things?’
‘Fine. What are you eating?’
‘Duck sandwich. How’s the patient?’
‘She’s not too bad. Enjoying a bit of hero worship, I think. I’m afraid you’ve lost your status as number one cop.’
‘Kathy has several advantages over me,’ he said. ‘She’s black and blue from head to foot, and she’s not likely to run off with their gran.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. Their confidence is so fragile. It would take so little to shatter it.’
‘Hmm.’
He wasn’t too sure about that. For all her tears at the thought of him pruning the bonsai’s toes, little Miranda had been quite prepared to murder it when that became necessary. He rather felt they were every bit as tough as yesterday’s duck.
They chatted for a while, then Suzanne said she would have to go and do something in the kitchen, and added, ‘Have you tried the Zola yet?’
‘It’s right here on my lap. I was just about to open it.’
‘I marked some passages for you. Have a look.’
She rung off. He refilled his glass and opened the book. The passages were marked by slips of paper, and he turned these over, reading. Some described the incredible new department store which was the central character of the book, its vast size and glittering interiors, its irresistible attraction to the fashionable consumers of Paris, its devastating effect on the old businesses around it, and the underpaid, desperate humans who worked within it.
Then he came to a page which Suzanne had doubly marked for him, describing the philosophy that had inspired Mouret, the creator of this phenomenon: Mouret… finished explaining the mechanism of modern commerce. And, above all that he had already spoken of, dominating everything else, appeared the exploitation of woman to which everything conduced-the capital incessantly renewed, the system of assembling goods together, the attraction of cheapness, and the tranquillising effect of the marking in plain figures. It was for woman that all the establishments were struggling in wild competition; it was woman whom they were continually catching in the snares of their bargains, after bewildering her with their displays… And if woman reigned in their shops like a queen, cajoled, flattered and overwhelmed with attentions, she was one on whom her subjects traffic, and who pays for each fresh caprice with a drop of her blood… Now the baron understood… His eyes twinkled in a knowing way, and he ended by looking with an air of admiration at the inventor of this machine for devouring the female sex. It was really clever.
Brock put down the book and pushed away the inedible duck sandwich. He got to his feet and went over to the bay window that projected out over the lane. The snow had finally begun, falling in big, lazy flakes through the still, cold air.
He lifted the glass of wine to his mouth and repeated aloud the words he had just read.
‘With a drop of her blood…’
