Gary Coldwood walked in out of the night. I muttered a coarse oath, and Coldwood shrugged laconically in reply.
‘Get it out of your system now,’ he suggested. ‘You’ve got a long ride ahead of you.’
Pen looked from me to him and back again. Then she looked across at a horrendous vase — some kind of Mingdynasty cuspidor — that she kept on the newel post at the foot of the stairs. There was a terrible strain on her face, and I could see exactly what she was thinking. I shook my head emphatically.
Coldwood conveniently assumed that I was reacting to his words. ‘No arguments,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’ll explain as we go, but this is time-sensitive. And it’s not business as usual, Fix. Far fucking from it.’
‘So I’m back on the books,’ I summarised, for Pen’s benefit more than for his or mine. ‘You want me to read a crime scene for you?’
Coldwood nodded slowly, but he seemed to think the nod needed to be qualified. ‘Something like that,’ he allowed. Behind him, Pen sagged with relief as her nervous system stood down abruptly from Defcon One.
‘I’ll leave you two to it then,’ she said cravenly, and she had it away on her heels. Edgar took flight at the last moment, dipping at a steep angle through the narrowing gap as Pen kicked the kitchen door closed behind her. He soared across to the shelf over the street door, where he stared down at us with beady-eyed fascination. It’s hard not to see him and his brother Arthur as Pen’s Hugin and Munin — spies in bird form sent abroad to gather intelligence in situations where she can’t eavesdrop herself.
‘Did I walk in on something?’ Coldwood asked. ‘Not that I give a monkey’s, you understand. But your mate Rafi checked out of his digs a fortnight back, didn’t he? So if you’re knocking off his lady love behind his back, you’ll probably wake up some day soon wearing your entrails as a bow tie.’
I gave Gary a look that might have dropped him where he stood if my hangover headache hadn’t taken the edge off it.
‘Leave it,’ I suggested.
‘Only too happy to.’ He looked at his watch, rubbing the ugly scar on his right cheek absent-mindedly. ‘Half past four,’ he mused. ‘Going to take us the best part of an hour, even at this time of night. Get some clothes on, Fix — and bring your paraphernalia.’
I could see in his face that there was no room for argument.
‘What’s it about?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see. Don’t worry, I’ll get you back in time for breakfast.’
Edgar gave a derisive caw. I knew what he meant: I’d heard that one before too.
Coldwood was right about it being a long drive, because we ended up south of the river, crossing foul old Father Thames at Lambeth just as the sun came up. The sky was clear apart from a few wisps of cirrus dead- centred in the windscreen of Coldwood’s unmarked Primera: it was going to be another scorcher. I looked between the maculate white chimneys of Battersea power station for a flying pig, but there wasn’t anything moving up there. We were on our own as we tacked south by east through the rat runs of Southwark.
‘How much further?’ I asked Coldwood, since he didn’t seem to want to tell me what it was I was going to be looking at. He didn’t answer: just looked at his watch again and made a vague calming gesture, like a stern dad to a child whining ‘Are we there yet?’ He seemed to have forgotten his earlier promise to brief me in the car.
‘Tell them we’re coming,’ he instructed his stolid, hatchet-faced driver. The driver nodded and muttered into a walkie-talkie. ‘Got the sarge and the . . .’ He hesitated and flicked a glance over his shoulder at me. ‘Exorcist,’ I filled in helpfully, but he decided to leave the sentence unfinished. ‘We’re on our way to the scene now.’
‘Don’t let the C2s in until we’re finished,’ Coldwood called out to him, and the driver relayed the instruction to whoever he was talking to. ‘C2s’ was an idiosyncratic abbreviation for
We drove through Newington as it was waking up: shopkeepers taking their armour plating down to greet the new day, or tipping buckets of foaming bleach on the dog turds in front of their doors; a sluggish street-cleaning van nosing its way along the gutters like a pig looking for truffles.
‘You didn’t seem surprised to hear that Rafi Ditko had gone walkies,’ Gary commented, looking back at me from the car’s front passenger seat. His face was so devoid of emotion that a passing artist might have mistaken it for a blank canvas. ‘We were only officially notified about it yesterday.’
‘Well, I keep my ear to the ground,’ I responded in kind.
‘Good way to get your face trodden on.’
‘If you catch me at it, feel free to cast the first boot.’
Gary frowned. He hates being smart-mouthed in front of his chattels and gofers, and this probably rankled all the more because he was doing me a favour: letting me know, in his own winsome way, that Rafi’s disappearance from the secure care facility where he’d lived — if you wanted to call it that — for the past three years had now become a police matter. It wasn’t good news, but it was coming sooner or later so there was no point in crying about it. We’d see what we’d see.
Perhaps by way of clawing back some of the points he’d just lost, Gary switched to another topic. ‘So who is it that’s watching you?’ he asked.
I blinked, false-footed. ‘Who’s what?’ Now this
‘Probably the rent man,’ I said sourly. Jenna-Jane bloody Mulbridge, much more likely. Maybe this was why she’d kept Rafi out of the news: so I’d relax, get sloppy and lead her straight to him. But obviously it hadn’t worked yet, or they wouldn’t still be there. And now — well, forewarned was forearmed.
Just south of Elephant and Castle we turned off the main drag onto a service road that took a slack-bellied run-up around the back of the station car park before screwing up its courage and leaping over Kennington Lane in the form of a concrete flyover. All the other traffic on the road was pulling to the left or right in two confused, jostling streams before they got onto this overpass, because directly ahead of us three more police cars had been parked so that they blocked the whole carriageway: or at least the whole carriageway apart from a single narrow gap guarded by a hard-faced WPC. Seeing us coming straight towards her she raised her hand to wave us away, but then she recognised either Coldwood or the driver and stood aside to let us through.
The road beyond had the unsettling emptiness of a school playground during the summer holidays. By this time on a weekday morning it ought to have been heaving; but there were only four vehicles that I could see, and none of them were moving. Two of them were Astras in police livery, with uniformed cops standing in inert clusters around them. A blonde woman in a black Dryzabone was talking to one of the clusters, pointing off towards the distant skyline: two boys in blue went forth to do her bidding. I thought I recognised that tall slim figure and hard handsome face, but there was no point in jumping off that bridge until I came to it.
The third vehicle was an ambulance, standing with its back doors wide open and its hoist platform down, and the last was a sprightly pillar-box red Ford Ka parked on a precariously angled concrete apron too narrow to be called a hard shoulder. Something about the sight of it gave me a sudden qualm of unease. I wasn’t entirely sure, though, whether or not that response was coming from the part of my perceptual equipment I call my death-sense. I couldn’t see anything dead in the vicinity — or, for that matter, anything in that badly defined and mystifying state we choose to call undead — but then we were still a hundred yards or so away. When we got closer, maybe I’d find out what it was that had set me off.
But we didn’t get closer: Coldwood tapped the driver’s shoulder and we slowed to a halt at the side of the road, up against a buckled steel crash barrier that seemed to have done its job on more than one occasion.
Coldwood got out, a little awkwardly because his legs hadn’t been set particularly well after being broken the year before — at certain angles they moved in a robotic, discontinuous way. I followed him because this was clearly the end of the ride. Walking around the back of the car to join him, I glanced idly over the edge of the parapet. We were high enough up that we were looking down on the mottled apron of a rooftop car park. The asphalt was bare apart from a phalanx of wheelie bins in one corner, behind which a black jacket lay like a dead bird: part of the inexplicable roadkill of the inner city.
Coldwood leaned against the flank of the car, hands in pockets, like Patience on a monument but with a more pugnacious facial expression. ‘So what’s the score?’ I asked him when it was clear that he wasn’t going to speak first.
