And it was a Tuesday, the day of the week when Isaac would climb the stairs from his office with its view of nothing, apart from the windows of a building on the opposite side of the street, to where Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Goddard sat with his panoramic view over the city. In the distance, the London Eye, one of London’s premier tourist attractions. Isaac had been on it once, taken an old girlfriend, but it had been overcast that day, and not only outside the capsule but inside too.
It was another failed outing with Jess O’Neill, another attempt at reconciliation that was thwarted by too much history, too many attempts to meet up, too many issues clouding the mind of the other. Isaac was invariably involved in a case, and Jess was always concerned about the next episode of the soap opera of which she was the executive manager, or a casting issue, or whether the decline in the ratings was permanent, or just temporary.
Whatever the reason, once the capsule had returned to the ground, they had gone their separate ways. It was a strange situation in that they still loved each other in their own way, but it had not stopped Isaac spending two nights with a woman in a fancy hotel in Montego Bay in Jamaica on his recent visit there. He had met her in Kingston, the capital of that vibrant country, they had hit it off and met up on an occasional basis during the two weeks that he was there, and now she was coming to London, supposedly on business, but he knew that she wanted to meet up with him again.
A holiday fling with all the attendant passion, the time to devote to the relationship, the lack of care about the cost, and the hotel in Montego Bay had not come cheap. If she was coming to London assuming that his lifestyle was five stars, his car a Mercedes and his flat luxurious rather than its modest two bedrooms, then she was in for a rude shock.
Not that he could blame her for wanting to come. Jamaica may have been idyllic for a tourist with British money, but it was a tough call if you had to live there on a minimum wage.
Wendy, his sergeant, was out of the office most days, attempting to find Big Greg, knowing full well that he was no longer anywhere near Challis Street. She was monitoring all those who approached the charitable institutions across London, although with no bites so far. There had been two false alarms, as a tall man from the street was not so common, but the first, in the east of the city, had turned out to be a man with a strong foreign accent, the second an alcohol-sodden illiterate, neither of whom fitted the description of the man they were looking for.
Bridget had compiled a case for the prosecution, which was tight apart from the name of the murderer. Big Greg was clearly not a name, and any attempt to unravel the man’s secret had been in vain. The man only answered to Big Greg, not Greg, nor Gregory, not even Big, which created another problem.
There were registers of the homeless, the missing, filed by organisations and concerned relatives. Bridget had poured through all the information that she had managed to obtain, but even the name Greg was suspect. Larry and Isaac had discussed on several occasions what it was that forced a man such as Big Greg to give up a perfectly normal life and to take to the street, with its deprivations. One of the locations under a bridge that the man had favoured was neither clean nor healthy, and the smell of stale urine, stale alcohol, and faecal matter from dogs and people, not too careful where either deposited it, was overpowering. Larry had wanted to wear a mask in there when he questioned the people lying on the ground or propping themselves up against a wall, but that would only have raised their distrust. Those that he had found there had, bar one or two, given up on life, and as long as they had a brown paper bag with a bottle inside, or the opportunity to shoot up heroin, the discarded syringes testament to the fact, then they were fine. Big Greg had apparently not given up on life, and apart from how he lived and looked, the man had seemed normal. The only assumption, and it was weak at best, was that the man was genius level, borderline mad.
‘What’s the deal with this murder? How many weeks is it now?’ Goddard asked from his side of the desk. There had been the handshake on entering, the usual general chat about the weather, the family, the poor state of the economy. Isaac had regarded the man as a friend, still did, and as a mentor. It had been DCS Goddard, then an inspector, who had taken the young Isaac Cook under his wing and had put him into plain clothes and then into Homicide. The two men had a long history where both of their careers had been on the line, where both had felt the wrath of their seniors. At least with this case there was no escalating murder count, no politician attempting to distort the evidence and looking for a cover-up. There had been a few of those in the past, and whereas he, Isaac Cook, remained idealistic, he knew that his senior had sold out.
Not that Isaac could blame him. There had been a time when he had felt that professionalism and competency and delivering results were the way to the top. But now, even more so than before, there was another factor, missing in his case, apparent in Goddard’s, and that was licking the boots of those who controlled an officer’s ascension in the Met.
It
