Glenn Branson sat in silence behind the wheel of the black Hyundai, staring wretchedly at his house. He had been here for five hours.
The small, 1960s semi was on a steep street in Saltdean, inland from the cliff top and a real wind trap. In the hooley that was blowing, the car rocked constantly and rain thwacked on to the body panels.
Tears streamed down his face. He was oblivious to the freezing cold, to his hunger, to his need to pee. He just stared across at the little house with its bright yellow front door that was his home. Stared at the front facade that was now like some kind of a Berlin Wall between himself and his life. It was all a sodding blur. His eyes blurred by his tears. The car windows blurred by the driving rain. His mind blurred by love, by anger and by pain.
He’d watched Ari arrive home shortly after ten and she hadn’t spotted him in this car. Then he’d waited for the male babysitter, whoever the arrogant bastard was, to leave. It was now twenty past two in the morning and he still had not left. Over two hours ago, the lights had gone off downstairs, then had come on in her bedroom. After a while, they had gone off there too. Which meant she was sleeping with this babysitter. Screwing him in their house.
Were Sammy and Remi going to run into the bedroom in the morning, as they always did, excitedly calling out, ‘Mummy! Daddy!’, only to find a strange man in the bed? Or had they stopped running in now? How much had changed in his home during these past few weeks?
The thought was like a knife twisting in his soul.
He looked at the car clock. 2.42. He looked at his watch, as if hoping the car clock was wrong. But his watch said 2.43.
A plastic dustbin lid rolled along the pavement. Then he saw a flurry of ice-blue splinters in his mirrors and moments later a police patrol car shot by, roof spinners on but siren off. He saw it turn right at the top of the road and disappear. It might be going to a domestic, or an accident, or a break-in – or anything. Reluctant to risk getting called away from here, he hesitated before phoning in. But he was using a police pool car and that obliged him to be on call. And, despite all that was happening in his private life, he was still grateful to the police force for giving him the chances in life it had.
On his mobile, he phoned through to the control room at Southern Resourcing Centre.
‘Glenn Branson here. I’m the on-call DS for the Major Crime Branch. I’ve just seen the boys go by in Saltdean with the blues and twos – anything for us?’
‘No, they’re on their way to an RTC.’
Relieved, he ended the call. Within moments his full focus was again on his house. His anger was growing. He did not care about anything except what was going on inside his house.
And finally he could not restrain himself any longer. He climbed out of the car, crossed the road, walked up to his front door, feeling furtive, a stranger, as if he should not be here, should not be walking up the path to his own front door.
He pushed the key into the lock and tried to turn it. But it would not move. He took it out, puzzled, wondering for an instant whether he had used the key to Roy Grace’s front door in error. But it was the right key. He tried again and still it would not turn.
Then it dawned on him. She had changed the lock!
Memories of a hundred movie scenes of spouses fighting flashed through his mind. Then, in an explosion of rage, he rang the doorbell, a long ring, a good ten seconds of jangling noise from inside the house. And he realized, through his red mist of anger, that he had never in his life before rung his own doorbell. He followed it by hammering on the door.
Moments later he sensed light above him and looked up. Ari was standing at the bedroom window, the curtains parted. She pushed the window open and looked down, her face peering out of the top of her pink dressing gown, her sleek, straightened black hair looking immaculate, the way it always did, as if she had just stepped out of a hair salon. It even looked that way after they’d gone white-water rafting, one time.
‘Glenn? What the hell are you doing? You’ll wake the kids!’
‘You’ve changed the fucking locks!’
‘I lost my keys,’ she shouted back, defensively.
‘Let me in!’
‘No.’
‘Fuck you, this is my home too!’
‘We agreed to be apart for a while.’
‘We didn’t agree you could bring men home and fuck them.’
‘I’ll talk to you in the morning, OK?’
‘No, you let me in and we talk now!’
‘I’m not opening the door.’
‘I’ll break a fucking window if that’s what you want.’
‘Do that and I’m calling the police.’
‘I am the police, in case you’d forgotten.’
‘Do what the hell you want,’ she said. ‘You always have done!’
She slammed the window shut. He stepped back to get a better view, saw the curtains being pulled tightly shut and the light go off.
He clenched his fists, then unclenched them, his mind a maelstrom. He walked some yards up the street. Then down again. A car drove past, some small custom job with rap playing on boom-box speakers, shaking the already shaken air. He stared up at his house again.
For a moment, he was tempted to smash a window and let himself in – and break the fucking babysitter’s neck.
The problem was, he knew that’s exactly what he would do if he went in.
Reluctantly, he turned away, climbed back into the Hyundai and drove down to the main coast road. He halted at the T-junction, signalling right. As he was about to pull out, he noticed a tiny pinprick of light a long way off in the murky darkness. A ship of some kind, out at sea.
And suddenly he had a thought that momentarily pushed his anger to one side.
The thought stayed with him, developing more in his mind, as he drove along the gusty road, through Rottingdean and Kemp Town, and then along Brighton seafront.
Back in Roy’s house, he poured himself a large whisky, then sat down in an armchair and thought some more.
He was still shaking with anger about Ari.
But the thought stayed with him.
And it was there when he woke, three hours later.
He had been rubbish at most subjects at school, because his dad, who was either drunk or stoned, and beat up his mother, consistently told him he was no good, the way he told his two brothers and his sisters they were no good either. And Glenn had believed him. He’d spent his childhood being moved from one care home to another. Geometry was the one subject he had liked. And there was one thing he remembered from that, and it had stuck in his head all night.
Triangulation.
61
At nine o’clock in the morning, Ian Tilling sat at his desk in his office in Casa Ioana, in Bucharest, and enthusiastically studied the lengthy email and scanned photographs that had come in from his old mate Norman Potting. Three sets of fingerprints, three e-fit photographs, two of young males and one of a young female, and several photographs, the most interesting of which was the close-up of a primitive tattoo of the name Rares.
It felt good to be involved in some detective work again. And with the briefing meeting about to start, it was really going to feel like the old days!
He sipped his mug of Twinings English Breakfast tea – his elderly mother in Brighton posted him regular supplies of the tea bags, as well as Marmite and Wilkin & Sons Tiptree Medium Cut Orange Marmalade. Just about the only things he missed from England that he could not easily obtain out here.
Seated on wooden chairs in front of his desk were two of his female social workers. Dorina was a tall twenty-three-year-old with short black hair who had come to Romania from the Republic of Moldova with her husband. Andreea was an attractive girl. She had long brown hair and was dressed in a V-neck brown jumper over a striped shirt and jeans.
Andreea reported first, giving the general consensus that Rares was quite a posh name, and was unusual for a street kid. She opined that the tattoo was self-inflicted, which indicated the girl might be a Roma – or Tigani – a gypsy. She added that a Roma girl and a non-Roma boyfriend would be very uncommon.
‘We could put an announcement up on the main noticeboard,’ Dorina said, ‘with the photographs. See if any of our homeless clients have any information who these people might be.’
‘Good idea,’ Tilling said. ‘I’d like you to contact all the other homeless charities. Andreea, if you could get these to the three Fara homes, please.’
There were two Fara homes in the city and a farm out in the country, charitable institutions set up by an English couple, Michael and Jane Nicholson, which took in street kids.
‘I’ll do that this morning.’
Tilling thanked her, then glanced at his watch. ‘I have a meeting at the local police station at half past nine. Can the two of you contact the placement centres in all six local authority areas?’
‘I already started,’ Dorina said. ‘I’m not getting a good response. I just spoke to one, but they refused to assist. They’re saying that they cannot share confidential information – and that it’s the police who should be making the enquiries and not some director of a charity.’
Tilling thumped his desk in frustration. ‘Shit! We all know what kind of help to expect from the bloody police!’
Dorina nodded. She knew. They all knew.
‘Just keep trying,’ Ian Tilling said. ‘OK?’
She nodded.
Tilling sent a brief email back to Norman Potting, then left the room for the short walk to Police Station No. 15. To the only police officer he knew who might be helpful. But he was not optimistic.
62
Glenn Branson, feeling alert and wired despite his ragged night, stood in the corridor outside the briefing room, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and an All-Day Breakfast egg, bacon and
