her early unknown days she wrote a self-published biography called
“How did you find out all this?”
April shrugged. “Tracking sites and podcasts is another thing you do when you can’t go out. Any time a computer is touched it leaves a track. The only way to destroy evidence like that is to unplug the thing, dig a hole in the ground, and cover it with dirt. Besides, I like making connections. Maybe I take after my grandfather after all.”
“Well, it’s a talent we can certainly use around here.” Longbright handed her the rest of the interviews. “Don’t even think about leaving again.”
¦
Dan Banbury placed a magnetic disc on the blurred screen-grab at the top of the board, moving the photograph of McZee down.
“So we’re agreed,” said May. “Until we receive any further information, McZee drops to second place behind this unknown husband.” He squinted at the head shot, trying to make it out. “Is that the best you can get? Can’t you enhance it?”
“What with?” asked Banbury. “We haven’t got the right on-site equipment. I can send it off to WEC, see if they’ll stick it onto one of their jobs.” The unit had been promised its own crime lab, but someone – May suspected Leslie Faraday – had refused to sign off on the new agreed budget.
“Then get some better shots. Her sex life’s been spread all over the Web. You must be able to get something more than a vaguely male shape caught leaving a restaurant with her. Meera, do you want the bad news?”
“Let me guess: I’m doing surveillance on the artist formerly known as Josh Ketchley,” said the young Indian officer without looking up.
“Right, and take Bimsley with you.”
“Can’t, sir. We’ve no spare vehicles, so I’ve been given permission to use my bike.”
“You’re not watching someone from a bicycle,” said May.
“No, sir, a reconditioned thousand-cc Kawasaki. I stripped it down myself. No room for an uncoordinated pillion rider – no offence, Colin.” She flicked a smile at PC Bimsley, whose heart skipped a beat. Something about small, strong women opened his soul to the sky.
“Very well, but stay in the warm somewhere. I’m not having you catch pneumonia.” May sighed. “Did anyone see Arthur leave the building this morning?”
“He said something about following up a lead from one of the teachers you interviewed,” said Kershaw.
“He has no right to go off by himself,” May complained, throwing down his pen. “What does he think he’s doing?”
¦
The Roland Plumbe Community Estate had been built on one of London’s less visible sites, above the brown concrete towers of the Barbican, below the drab grey bricks of Finsbury, sandwiched between Bunhill Fields and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, a negative place where bombs had wiped out history and planners had exercised so little imagination that it could only become the province of the poor.
The apartments had been prefabricated from imperfect concrete slabs containing air pockets that soaked up rain and trapped it in the walls. The triangle of land on which the estate survived had been cleared of wartime rubble and used for asbestos-lined bungalows until 1962, when the great block had risen under new plans for working Londoners enthusiastically approved by Harold Macmillan.
The main building had had seven long balconies and a park at either end, but these greenlands had been lost when two wings were added. The resulting alteration to the original plans left the estate claustrophobic and lightless. Successive councils had tried to alleviate the gloom with bright colours, but in the early 1980s the first graffiti arrived, and it had never been successfully removed without wrecking the paintwork. The stilts upon which the central block stood proved impossible to light adequately, and provided an ideal home for lurking street gangs.
Fundamental flaws were obvious, even from ground level. The steel lifts opened onto the street side of the building, granting access to anyone looking for a place to inject or relieve themselves. The bedrooms had been intended to overlook parkland, but now overlooked other apartments, which destroyed the tenants’ privacy. The architects weren’t entirely to blame, he supposed. Who could have foreseen how much society would change? Who in wartime could have imagined the end of the traditional urban family unit? He passed a bleak playground consisting of a scarred green roundabout and broken swings, beyond peeling prefabricated garages that had been hastily erected on the only remaining free ground, and headed into the darkness beneath the block’s concrete stilts.
Walking between oily pools of water into the threatening shadows, he reflected that one of the benefits of old age was finding how few things scared him. He had survived a war, seen friends die before his eyes, faced the ebb and flow of various fads and panics that had briefly gripped the country. He had watched politicians pronounce on the end of civilisation, and had listened to grieving, desperate families as they coped with the loss of their loved ones. Dark alleys had no power to harm him now.
“You shouldn’t be here alone, Mr Bryant.” Lorraine Bonner stepped from the shadows to greet him. She was a heavy-beamed black woman in her mid-forties, with a broad face predisposed to smiling. Dressed in a bright red patchwork overcoat, she brought a cheerful touch to the surrounding gloom. “I came to get you ‘cause the main lift is buggered.”
“How did you know me?” asked Bryant, shaking her hand. “I saw you on television. They seem keen to bill you as an English eccentric.” As they walked, she linked her arm in his. Bryant liked the gesture of warmth in such a chill environment. She reminded him of his Antiguan landlady.
“Television is only interested in freaks,” he told her. “I’m afraid that’s probably how they see me. Celebrity is fleeting.”
“Well, you look normal to me, love. We’d better get off the street. The school will be starting sports practise soon. The kids have to pass through here, and their enemies lie in wait for them. It’s not a good idea to get caught in the middle, know what I mean?”
She led the way to a goods lift at the rear of the building and ushered him in. “You’re lucky, this one’s working today. The first time in three weeks.”
Mrs Bonner was the head of the Roland Plumbe Residents’ Association, and liaised with housing officers when she wasn’t working at the Middlesex Hospital. She had called the police to point out that the man she kept seeing on the rolling news had been sighted by residents on the estate. Meanwhile, Bryant had just finished reading his partner’s notes on his meeting with Elliot Mason, and the teacher’s mention of trouble in the area suggested that the call was worth checking out.
“We’ll go to the community office,” she said. “My kids are at home with colds, and I wouldn’t inflict them on you today. They’re hyperactive and can take some getting used to.”
“I’m not good with children,” Bryant understated, entering the glass-walled office. It was typical of so many community rooms housing people in states of emotional distress. No technical innovations here, just Post-it notes, brown folders, papers, Kleenex boxes, children’s drawings, cheap orange plastic chairs, and stained carpet tiles – nothing that could be stolen or used as a weapon. “Everyone comes here with their problems,” Mrs Bonner told him, flicking on the fierce strip lighting. “They can scream and shout, it don’t make any difference to me. I wait for them to calm down, then explain what we can do. It’s probably like your job.”
