You can catch a bus directly from Sandley to Canterbury, so that’s what Sterling did, waiting at half past nine that Thursday morning at the Guildhall with his fellow travellers. But for two teenaged girls, a youngish couple and him, the crowd was mostly pensioners. As the bus wended through the villages on the way to the city, in a lulling rhythm of diversions off the main road and people getting on and off, the young couple in the seat in front looked at a racing page and discussed their bets. Sterling wondered about the teenagers. Today was a school day. But he wondered more, given his own reputation for bunking off, when he had become so puritanical.
The bus disgorged its passengers at the large bus station squeezed between the city wall and the Whitefriars shopping centre. The layout made it much easier to walk to the shops than the police station beyond the city wall, so Sterling made his way against the flow of the pedestrian throng. On the graffiti-scarred wall of the underpass, someone had written Trop jeune pour mourir – ‘Too young to die’ – a notch in quality above all the tiresome tags. He crossed the Dover Road at the crossing.
The Canterbury station was smaller than the one in Ypres, but when all is said and done, a police station is a police station. He announced that he had arrived to the civilian auxiliary and then took one of the hard plastic blue chairs near the door. A plump young woman with a pale, pasty face and small dark eyes rocked a grizzling baby in her arm, the baby’s feet hitched over her hip. A toddler whinged softly next to her. The woman’s right eye was almost closed, the skin around it yellow, turning to black. She looked exhausted and desperate.
From a side door, Andy Nolan emerged. Probably only the punch code was different from the door Sterling almost went through into the press throng in Ypres. He imagined a company called Bullingdon and Smith, makers of security glass doors to police forces the world over.
‘Frank,’ said Andy Nolan with his hand outstretched. ‘Good to see you.’
‘Detective Sergeant Nolan.’
‘What about my fucking assault?’ said the young woman. ‘I’ve been here an hour already, and then he waltzes in.’ She jerked a thumb at Sterling.
‘Waltzed,’ Sterling murmured. ‘I hardly think so.’
‘Whatever. But I need to see someone, and I don’t like people pushing in.’
‘My colleague will be out in a minute, Madam,’ said Andy. ‘She’s taken all your details, hasn’t she? I know she’s working on it for you.’ He took Sterling’s arm and marched him out, rolling his eyes and grimacing as he did. ‘She’s got a point. Things are much slower. There are even fewer of us than when you were on the force. We’ll pop into the university.’
‘The university?’
‘You need to get out of Sandley more, mate. Things are changing in Canterbury.’
Just next to the police station, a gleaming glass and steel frontage soared above them as the traffic roared around the ring road. That hadn’t been there two years before. The university logo and title were etched next to the electric sliding doors. The two men stopped for a moment in front of the magnificent learning palace. They looked across at the stubby, shabby little police station.
‘I think we might have made a wrong turn somewhere along the line,’ said Sterling.
‘Should have worked harder at school,’ said Andy Nolan. He led them through the sliding doors. ‘I come in here quite a lot. I helped them sort out some illegal downloading. There’s a café on the third floor. Follow me.’
He nodded to the desk staff, and they made their way upwards through a vast atrium. Sterling looked askance at his friend, the man who had shared a patrol car with him in the early years. He was a little shorter than Sterling’s five feet eleven. His light brown hair was beginning to go at the temples, but he did not sweep it back, so only a scalp connoisseur scared of losing his own fair locks would notice. He wasn’t the skinny young police officer Sterling used to know. He wasn’t fat, but he had filled out. Being a detective was not as active as being an ordinary plod. Sterling knew that himself.
Andy Nolan’s suit was smart, but not football-pundit fashionable. Sterling knew he couldn’t be bothered with all that. There was no change to the shoes, which were dull and scuffed, but just the right side of acceptable. My father made us polish our shoes daily, Andy Nolan had once said on a long night of vigil, so I can’t stand doing it now. He still walked in a kind of splay-footed amble. Sterling remembered what a good officer he had been. He had an easy manner, communicated well, calmed things down, moved things on – the perfect foil for the hothead Sterling had been. But he was implacable, as well. His shrewd brain had got him to the top of the league tables for convictions. And he was a politician. Sterling couldn’t be bothered, and that was why things were as they were now.
In the café, students were sprawled around drinking and talking. Nearby, a boy with dark, swept forward hair curved around his forehead tapped frenziedly at his laptop. Sterling found them a place to sit in the glass, chrome and plastic bubble looking out across the medieval city wall and into the park beyond it. The tall, white stuccoed Georgian mansions at the far side of the park looked as gracious as he remembered them – as gracious as the building he was sitting in was brash and modern.
‘Thanks, Andy,’ said Sterling as his coffee appeared.
‘Since I’m the one with the regular income….’
They sipped their coffee for a few moments. It was quiet in the café. One of the benefits of being in the library was avoiding the noise that passed as modern music. They small-talked for a while. Long ago, they had shared evenings out with their wives, as well as in the squad car. Andy Nolan was still married and had two children. Sterling’s wife was long gone.
‘So, Gloria and Keith Etchingham,’ he said, getting them down to business.
‘Yeah, the Etchinghams. Dover office is looking at it. As we say, “pursuing various promising lines of enquiry”.’
‘So they’re stuck.’
‘I think that’s a fair summary. There hasn’t been much progress since it all kicked off in late June. Or rather, some progress, but it’s all come pretty much down to nothing. Funny case. As in funny peculiar. Keith Etchingham was an entrepreneur. He did a bit of this and a bit of that, built things up in profitable directions. He was a wheeler-dealer and from all I’ve heard, a charmer. He and Gloria lived in a Georgian house near Martin Mill. She’s still there, of course.’
Sterling nodded. More than ever, he wished that he had had this conversation just after Gloria Etchingham had visited his office.
‘Gloria Etchingham called our Dover lot when her husband had been gone for about a day. At the beginning, they just said the usual. A day’s not enough. He could have just gone on a visit. Had they had a row? As I said, the usual. But she was insistent. He’d gone and something was up. His car was still outside the house when she got in from the weekly shop, but he was nowhere. So they sent a couple of blokes in a squad car to have a look around. In the garage, which Keith Etchingham used as a workshop rather than a place for the cars, and which Gloria rarely went into, they found blood. A lot of blood. And signs of a struggle. So then Dover took it more seriously. They got Etchingham’s DNA from wherever – toothbrush or hairbrush, can’t remember which – and compared it to the blood in the garage. It was a match. So someone had bashed Etchingham, maybe killed him, and borne him off.’
‘Borne him off, Andy?’
‘In effect. I can’t bear the jargon sometimes.’
‘But you’re looking for person or persons unknown.’
‘Well, perhaps not persons entirely unknown. What do you know about Keith Etchingham?’
‘Nothing directly. Alive or dead, he’s been sending me messages – but with a difference. He’s a bit of joker, a practical joker. I’ve been traipsing around in Belgium and in the end, here I am back almost to my front door. I found out he was charming. He took a Flemish chocolatier on a pub crawl, if you can imagine that.’
Andy smiled. Then he said, ‘Heard of PEDU, Frank?’
‘PEDU….’ Sterling rarely kept up with the news or current affairs. ‘Vaguely familiar, unpleasant connotations if it’s what I’m thinking of. Pan-English something-or-other.’
‘Every police force’s nightmare. As you know, we don’t care who does the marching and demonstrating. We’d just prefer if no one did it. But the Pan-English Defence Union is about the worst. Speciality: marches in ethnic and religious minority communities, with racist sloganising and flags. It’s got all the European far right connections. It’s eclipsing the BNP and all the other wacky groups. Credit to the Dover people – do you remember Tim Jones and Freddie Foxhill? – they dug up all that. And more. Etchingham was involved somehow. Apart from that, as I said, he was something of an entrepreneur. The marriage was meant to be good, though both of them apparently had their moments. They had all the trappings.’
‘So your blokes in Dover, among other things, they’re thinking that there might be a PEDU connection.’
‘Yup. But that’s where it gets difficult. They’re getting nothing from the PEDU leadership, and it’s all gone to the lawyers. Anyway, that’s one line of enquiry. The biggest, I think. The anti-fascist groups have been helpful – for once. They reckon they’ve heard rumours of stuff gone missing, feuds, vendettas; power struggles. What those far right groups are best at, I reckon.’
‘What about Gloria? Where do Jones and Foxhill think she fits in to all of this?’
‘Gloria … I’ve never met her, but she’s made her mark with my Kent Constabulary colleagues. Beautiful. Sexy. Knows what she wants and how to get it. Quite the femme fatale. Indisputably, according to the Andy Nolan classification system you know so well, a man’s woman.’
Sterling shifted uncomfortably, looked down, sipped some more of his coffee. Part of him knew exactly what Andy was saying. The stupid part thought that Gloria was charmed exclusively by some mysterious qualities found only in him. When he looked up, Andy was looking at him with a little smile.
‘Same old Frank,’ he said, but kindly rather than mocking. ‘So, I’ve laid the force’s cards on the table. Your turn.’
Sterling knew it was coming and was just about ready. The boy at the keyboard had stopped and was sprawling over a banquette. All that tapping had exhausted him. ‘Your Dover colleagues. Do they know we’re having this meeting?’
‘They know some of it, Frank. They don’t know all you’ve been up to, any more than I do. But they, and I, for that matter, are interested in solving the case. It’s murder or abduction, and you can’t hold up a police enquiry. You know that. And – this will interest you – they have been contacted by our Belgian counterparts. Perkins, Pikestaff, Peters – some name like that, but Belgian.’
Pieters had been efficient.
Sterling wondered how long he had known Andy Nolan – ten, twelve years. They’d had some good and bad times together. They had stuck up and covered for each other. They’d shared all those greasy kebabs at godforsaken hours. There was no one he trusted more. He told him almost everything.
At the end, Andy said, ‘We can help each other.’
And Sterling said, ‘All I ask is, let me work out how best.’