2
The detective had led the way up to the attic. During that day he had become familiar enough, as familiar as he wanted to be, with the cramped space under the slope of the roof. He cased back against a wall, brushing against the peeling paper.
Below him the stairway protested at the weight of the two that followed him. The local detective thought it understandable that the Secretary of State would have his own man from Protection with him. The bodyguard would have lived long enough in the Secretary of State's pocket to have become a part of the retinue, almost family. He understood that the Secretary of State needed a face to trust. The Secretary of State emerged into the attic, white dust and cobwebs on the collar of his black overcoat. The detective had taken to the furthest corner, he left the centre ground to the Secretary of State and his bodyguard. He had seen them all. The ones on the breadline, and the most powerful in the land. They all came bowed and subdued to witness the place, the stinking corner, where their child had died. Usually the mothers came too. He knew that some would be aggressive, some would be broken, some crippled with shame. Their child, their future, blown away by a hypodermic syringe. The room was pitifully bare, and even more confused than when the police had first been alerted by the ambulance team because his squad had turned the place over and ransacked every inch of it. The mattress had been taken apart. The girl's clothes had been put into a black plastic sack after examination. Her papers were collected into a cellophane bag which would go to his office for further examination.
The bodyguard stood at the top of the stairway. He gave the sign with his eyes, he told the local man to get on with his talk. The Secretary of State was known to the policeman only through the television in his living room and the photographs in the newspapers that he never seemed to find time to read but which were kept for lighting the fire before he went to work. The Secretary of State was not a pretty sight, looked like a man who had been kicked hard in the testicles an hour before. He could stand, but the colour was gone from his face.
He'd done well, the local man, he had had the name, alerted the Metropolitan, and now had the parent where the parent wanted to be, and all this before the rat-pack had wind of the excitement. Drily he thought to himself, if nothing else went right on this one then getting the Secretary of State into and out of this crap heap before the photographers pitched up was good going. He took the lead from the bodyguard.
'Lucy had been living here for several weeks, sir, at least she was here for a month. Only known means of support, the Social Security. Preliminary post mortem indicates that she was a serious victim of addiction – we don't regard users as criminals, sir, we tend to refer to them as victims. Her wrist veins have been used, no good anymore, and her thigh and shin veins have also been used. She had taken to using the smaller veins in her feet as an injection route. I am assuming that you were aware that she was addicted, sir – I mean, it must have been pretty obvious, obvious that is if you were still in touch with your daughter… '
The Secretary of State had his head down, made no response. Just like all the rest of them, feeling it a duty to get some feel of where their child had died. Christ, the room stank.
'… We cannot yet be certain of the cause of death, not in exact terms, that will come later when Pathology have had their full whack, but the first indicators are, sir, that she took a rather pure dose. What she took was just too much for her system. That causes a coma, and then vomiting. Blocked windpipe does the rest – I'm sorry, sir.'
The Secretary of State's voice was a flat monotone. 'I've an old chum, medic in London. I talked to him right at the beginning. I said, 'Whose child becomes an addict?' He said,
'Your kid.' He said, 'No one worries when the addict is that nice kiddie from next door, but by Heavens they worry when it's the nice kiddie upstairs.' We thought that we had done everything for her. She went to the best schools, when she went onto heroin we sent her to the best withdrawal clinic.
Just a waste of money. We cut her allowance, so she sold everything we'd ever given her. She moved out, then came back and stole from us. Can you imagine that, officer, stealing from her own parents… of course, you can imagine it, you are accustomed to the misery caused by this addiction. The last thing we did was have the Ministry's own security system in our own house changed. I mean that's coming to something, isn't it, when the Secretary of State for Defence has to have his own alarm system changed because his own daughter might want to break in… Her mother will want to know, can't hide much from her mother, would she have been in pain?'
'Coma first, sir. No pain.' The detective was past shock, past sympathy, and way past apportioning blame. He could be matter of fact. 'She had the stuff. It's if she hadn't had the stuff that she would have been in pain.'
'How much would it have been costing her?'
'From what we've seen, anything between a hundred and two hundred a week – when it's got that bad.'
The local detective wondered how the politician would survive it. He wondered whether he would shut himself away from public life once the storm blew, the headlines tomorrow and the Coroner's Court reporting. Whether he would carry on as if his public and private lives were separate compartments. He wondered if the pursuit of his public life could have so damaged a private life that a lone, lost child took to a syringe for companionship, for love.
The Secretary of State had a good grip on himself, his voice was clear. Nothing staccato, nothing choked. 'A colleague of mine said recently, 'This abuse brings hardened criminals and indulgent users together in a combination that is potentially lethal for good order and civilised values – the price of ultimate failure is unthinkable.' That was before Lucy had her problem, I didn't take much notice of it then. What are you doing about it, officer, this lethal combination?'
The local detective swallowed his first thoughts. Not the moment to spit out his gripes about resources and priorities, and bans on overtime payment which meant that most of his squad clocked off on the dot of office hours. He said, 'Gather what evidence we can, sir, try and move our investigation on from there.'
'Do you have children, officer?'
'Yes, sir.'
'What age?'
'About half your Lucy's age, sir.'
'Could it happen to them, what happened to her?'
'As long as the stuff's coming in, sir, flooding in like it is
– yes, sir.'
'What would you want done, officer, if she had been yours?'
'I'd want to get to the fuckers… excuse me, sir… to the people who made the stuff available to your Lucy.'
'You'll do what you can?'
'Bluntly, sir, that's not a lot. Yes, we will.'
The bodyguard had flicked his fingers, a small gesture close to the seam of his trousers. The local man had the message.
He moved around and behind the Secretary of State, to the head of the staircase. The bodyguard was already warily descending. There was music playing on a lower floor. The detective had had one session with the other residents of this terraced house, and he would have another later that afternoon when he had got himself shot of the big man. He hadn't been heavy with them, the others in the squat, not once he had discovered who Lucy Barnes' father was. Counter productive, he would have said, to have leaned too hard on them right now. He wanted their help, he needed all they could give him.
From the top of the staircase he looked back. The Secretary of State was staring down at the mattress, and the bag of clothes, and the junk litter that might the previous week have been important to a nineteen-year-old girl.
He paused at the bottom of the stairs.
'What does he think I'm going to do about it?'
The bodyguard shrugged.
Two, three minutes later, they heard the creaking of the stairs. The detective thought he saw a redness at the eyes that were distorted by the Secretary of State's rimless spectacles.
On the pavement the Secretary of State paused beside his car. The chauffeur was holding open the back
