“Meet me at South Kensington” sounds more like a 1950s rom-com than an instruction from a senior officer, but less than an hour later I’m striding down Montrose Grove, heading back to Oliver Cairns’ place. Up ahead, Steele’s standing under a cherry-blossom tree a little way down from the house, tapping away on her phone, her small frame engulfed in pink. There isn’t a breath of wind and the branches are eerily still, as if the heat has zapped all their energy and they can’t be bothered to move, like the rest of us. As I get closer, I notice that two petals have dropped onto Steele’s head—perfect pink on perfect black. I should probably tell her or move them. But I don’t. They look pretty.
And here, my wistfulness ends. Steele’s straight down to business.
“News?” she orders, sliding her phone into her bag as we start walking.
I take it from the top, filling her in on the Bailey interview. Her claims that she was mistaken. My belief she’s talking bullshit. The convenient unknown whereabouts of her alibi, “American Dave.” A lie about an umbrella.
“I think she was telling the truth about Fellows, though. I doubt she’s going to be our link.”
“That famous woo-woo working overtime, is it?”
“Depends if you think body language is woo-woo. I watched her squirm and blush and fidget with her hair for more than half an hour—except when she described Holly, then she went totally still, the way you do when you’re having to concentrate.” Steele nods, getting my point. “But when I mentioned Fellows . . . I dunno . . . it’s the first time she seemed natural. Genuine confusion. Her first response wasn’t outright denial, it was to ask who he was. That feels like a normal reaction to me.”
She nods again.
“So what are we doing back here?”
Or more to the point, what am I doing back here? Don’t get me wrong, I like Cairns—I’ve clearly got a soft spot for tall, loquacious Irish men—but I still feel like a teenager being forced to visit an aged relative with their mum.
“More context. I want to make sure I’ve got all my facts straight before I destroy someone’s career.” We walk up the steps to the front door. “And you’re impartial,” she adds, answering my un-asked question. “I want you watching, observing. You might pick up on something I don’t.”
It takes two rings of the bell and three knocks on the door before “All right, all right, give a man a chance,” can be heard, followed by painfully slow footsteps, shuffling closer, getting louder.
Finally, he opens the door. He’s wearing a full tuxedo, cummerbund and all.
“Oh.”
“Oh indeed.” Steele beams. “Look at you, James Bond. Are you off out?”
“No.” He winks at me. “I always dress like this for me dinner.”
“Very funny.”
We follow him into the aircraft-hangar living room, where there’s a duvet on one sofa, an array of medications on the coffee table, and an ever so slightly sour smell in the air. Nothing horrific; it’s completely bearable, but if I were to guess, I’d say he’s been cocooned in here for a few days, sleeping downstairs. One end of another sofa has been elevated with cushions. Cairns lowers himself onto it, unable to hide his pain.
Forget impartial—I feel emotional. Mum’s final months unwelcomingly springing to mind.
“So where are you off to, then?” asks Steele, sitting down. I follow suit.
“Nowhere. I was going to go the Emerald Society Summer Ball—big posh do at The Dorchester—but I just this minute decided I can’t be bloody bothered.”
“That’s a shame when you’re all dressed up, looking suave,” I say.
I’m being kind. He doesn’t look suave, he looks awful. Stooped and old, and even thinner, if that’s possible. His face a triangle of bone, the dark circles under his eyes made even darker by his waxy skin.
“I’m not feeling up to it, truth be told, Cat. I’ve had a rough few days.” A flick of his hand bats away the self-pity. “Anyway, it’s too fucking hot to be wearing a tux.” It’s also too fucking hot to have every window closed, and for one heartbreaking second I wonder if he hasn’t had the strength to open any. Sash windows can be heavy; the ones in our office are a bitch. “Now, would one of you ladies unclip this bow tie for me. My fingers are bad today. It took me nearly an hour to get the fucker on.”
In the absence of any movement from Steele, I oblige.
“Look, are you sure you feel up to a few questions?” Steele nods toward the duvet. “You must feel rough if you’ve been sleeping down here.”
“Ach.” Another flick of his hand. “’Tis easier than going up and down three flights of stairs. And sure, fire away. Although I’m going to be a bad host—if either of you want a drink, you can fetch it yourself.”
“We’re fine. Can we get you one?” “We” meaning me, presumably. Thankfully, he shakes his head. “OK, well, if you’re sure.”
“Glad of the company, Katie, love. I haven’t seen a soul in days. I didn’t realize when we were together how many of my friends were really Moira’s friends. And they fell away quick enough. Same as a lot of the old Met crowd. ’Twas nice seeing Tess again, though.”
“We’re actually here about Tess.” Steele’s face is stern, imploring. “But I need to know that I can talk to you confidentially.”
“You have to ask that?”
A wry smile. “You’re too fond of Tess Dyer for your own good, Olly, but I’m actually trying to help her by coming to you first, by getting all the facts straight. I want you to bear that in mind, OK? If you go running to her with what I’m about to tell you, it could prompt her to make the wrong decision, and this has to be handled properly.”
“OK, now you’re scaring me, Kate. What? What is it?”
“Why was Tess requesting bank records?”
“Whose bank records?”
She rolls her eyes. “The Queen of England’s, Olly. Who the hell do you think I’m talking about? Masters’, back in 2012. Why would she have taken on that task personally? She’s heading up one of the most high-profile cases in London’s recent history and she’s got time to be sitting on hold to HSBC?”
He doesn’t answer straightaway, looking this way and that. “Look, I really can’t answer that, Kate, but you know yourself, when the case is high profile, when the stakes are that high, you want to oversee everything. God knows, I put pressure on her to oversee everything. Too much pressure. I can see that now.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Olly, but first, I don’t know that myself. I trust my team to do the work. I trust them with my life.” A part of me dies inside. Maryanne. Aiden. My family’s links to organized crime. The fact I toyed with the idea of leaving her for Dyer. The fact I’m still toying with the idea of leaving her for NYC. “And second, when we were here last time, you said something different. You said you were all about taking the pressure off her. Protecting her from herself, closing down ‘half-cocked’ theories and the like.”
“And I thought I was. I thought by reining her in when it came to making the big decisions, I was freeing her up to do actual police work. And we needed all hands on deck, trust me.”
“Requesting bank records, though. That’s grunt work. I’ve had rookies who’d have turned their noses up.”
A defiant stare. “Tess Dyer has never turned her nose up at anything she’s been asked to do, and that’s why she is where she is. I wouldn’t put it past her to head up the Met one day, and she’ll still be doing the grunt work then if that’s what needs to be done.”
“Well, that’s quite the school report, Olly, but she’s not quite the model student, I’m afraid. See, it turns out that she requested them, but didn’t upload them to the system. God knows what happened to them, but there was only ever Tess’s eyes on them until this week.”
He doesn’t blink. “So she’s fallible.”
“Hmm, fallible’s one word. Negligent is another.” What Dyer did was more than negligent, but Steele’s holding back, teasing things out. “Olly, she shouldn’t have been on the case at all, not with the hell she was going through in her personal life.”
“No.” He points a swollen finger. “No, don’t use that against her, Kate. A bloody admin oversight has nothing to do with what was going on at home. Tess Dyer is a professional.”
Tess Dyer is a professional.
Tess Dyer never turns her nose up at what she’s asked to do.
Tess Dyer shits glitter and cries rainbows, and heals the sick in her spare time.
I’ve no idea why I’m being caustic. I fell for it, for a while.
Cairns isn’t finished. “And whether you’ve a sick spouse at home or not, mistakes get made, Kate. Things get missed, mislaid. It’s human error. There’s only so many hours in the day.”
Steele sneaks a look at me—wish me luck.
“Thing is, Olly, that’s all well and good, but I haven’t given up my Monday night crochet circle”—I have no idea if she’s joking—“to come here telling tales about an admin oversight. Those bank records that Tess requested, read, and then failed to upload or report to anyone, prove that Christopher Masters wasn’t in London the day Holly Kemp went missing. Which means the witness isn’t credible and all assumptions fall apart. In all likelihood, someone else killed Holly and Tess has known that all along.”
I expect shock, outrage, maybe a short period of silence while he struggles to digest. But the ex–Chief Superintendent comes to the fore almost instantly. His body may be crocked, but his brain is still needle-sharp.
“So, let me get this straight, Masters wasn’t at the house, but Holly was?”
“So Serena Bailey insists,” I say, finally inserting myself.
“Well then, Tess was right and I was wrong. An accomplice is the obvious explanation.”
“Sir, we’ve got doubts about whether Bailey was even there herself. She’s lied to us throughout the course of the investigation. There’s no sign of her on CCTV. She wasn’t marked as being absent . . .”
“Tess was right?” Steele cuts across me, her voice breaking the sound barrier. “Olly, she ignored crucial evidence in a murder investigation.”
“How do you know that for sure?” His tone is changing, every word a provocation. “You only know Tess requested the bank records, then received them. You don’t know, you can’t prove, that she read them.”
Steele’s eyes widen. “I’m sorry, is that supposed to be an observation, because it sounds a lot like a challenge? A threat.” She gives him a long penetrating stare, playing the tough nut to a T. “Oh, she read them, Olly, because she’s a professional, like you say. And it’s not up to me to prove anything. That’ll be up to the DPS.” The Department of Professional Standards, or the Department of Professional Shit-stirrers as Flowers likes to call them. “She can explain to them why she withheld potentially vital evidence.”
Cairns folds his arms, lets out one short, angry breath. “She did it because I ordered her to.” Steele audibly gasps. “I told her to delete those records out of her email and never speak of them again. And I told you, Tess Dyer does what she’s asked to do.”
“And that includes committing misconduct in a public office?” Steele’s shock goes beyond the implications of this case. She’s looking at Cairns like she’s never seen him before. “What the actual fuck, Olly?”
“Ah now, calm down. Misconduct? I was protecting our case. We had Serena Bailey and we had no reason to doubt her. None. Why the hell would she lie?” The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “She was as solid a witness as ever I saw in my career, and that was a forty-three-year career, I’ll remind you. Forty-three years of making decisions that put villains where they belong.” He sits up straighter, seeming braver, even physically stronger after dropping his bomb. “And look, OK, maybe I wasn’t totally honest with you. Maybe Tess’ personal life was affecting her work. Maybe I should have taken her off the case. But that’s my failing, not hers. I pushed her into tying Holly up with Masters. Blame me, not her.”
Blame me, not her. The same thing Dyer had said about Susie Grainger. A warped sense of responsibility passed from mentor to mentee.
“But why?” says Steele, still wide-eyed and dumbstruck. “And what would you have done if Masters hadn’t decided to play silly buggers and keep schtum? He could have given himself an alibi at any point. It’s a measure of the man’s lunacy that he didn’t.”
He shrugs. “If he did, he did. I was fairly sure he wouldn’t, though—that bastard liked the control, liked giving people the runaround. As for why . . . I had pressures too, Kate. Looking out for Tess. Turvill breathing down my neck. Me and Moira on the skids. I wanted that case closed.”
“So you withheld evidence. Jesus, Olly . . .”
He closes his eyes, taking a moment. “Look, those bank records weren’t the be-all and end-all for me. His card could have been stolen or cloned. Jesus, my nephew had his whole bloody account emptied by someone on a spending spree in São Paulo!”
“His card wasn’t stolen,” I say, deadpan. “It’s clear from his bank records that he used it the next day, in and around Clapham. And as for cloned—one quick call to the bank would have put that to bed.”
His eyes land on mine for a second, then dart back to Steele.
“Anyway, you call it withholding evidence, I call it directing resources and attention down the most obvious path—and with Bailey, Masters was the most obvious path.” Another shrug. “And anyway, Masters’ brief could have requested the very same records at any point and he didn’t. It wasn’t our job to prove him innocent.”
“You don’t believe that, Olly. I know you don’t. What happened to you?” Her eyes glitter with what could be tears. The tough nut, cracked. “You know I have to hand this over to the DPS. I should have done it already.”
“Then why haven’t you?” There’s hope in his voice, but it couldn’t be more misplaced.
“I chose professional courtesy over professional duty and I’m already regretting that decision.” She stands up. “And I’d really appreciate you doing me the courtesy of not speaking to Tess about this. Let me do my job.”
“I will, Katie, love, if you do me one last courtesy. Forget this last half-hour. Remember all the years, all the pints. All the holes I dug you out of. I’m begging you, don’t finish her career over this. This was me, this was all on me.”
I look across at Steele, not sure what to say. She hasn’t spoken a word since Cairns’ front door closed, apart from a muttered “bloody typical” at the dollop of bird shit on her windshield. Eventually, I break the silence.
“You look like you just found out Santa doesn’t exist.”
In truth, she looks worse. She looks like she just found out not only does Santa not exist, but the very notion of him has been eradicated and outsourced to an expensive app. Presents downloaded. All letters to the North Pole scrapped forthwith. No more grottoes and elves and leaving a carrot out for the reindeer. All trace of magic stripped away.
“He’s dying,” she replies, her tone appropriately lifeless. “Prostate cancer. And now it’s spread to his spine. Good days and bad days, he says, but the upshot is it’s terminal.”
I think I always suspected it on some deep level. Even that first time in the pub, despite all the handshakes and wisecracks, Cairns still had that haunted, hollowed-out look of a man living on borrowed time. It’s a look I saw on Mum’s face enough times, even as she booked minibreaks, made plans for Christmas, tried to smile as she planted sunflowers she wouldn’t see bloom.
“Right. So not arthritis then?”
“Oh, he has rheumatoid arthritis. He got a nice double-whammy.” A quick glance upward. “Yep, Olly Cairns certainly did something to offend the big guy in the sky.”
My buttons are pressed. “Oh, come on, that’s bullshit. When your time’s up, your time’s up. It’s down to cell mutations, nothing to do with a vengeful God.”
Because if it was, it’d be Dad’s grave I’d be laying sunflowers on every month. Mum never did anyone any harm.
“How long have you known?” I ask.
“A few days. I tried to get hold of him the day Fellows’ name came up, just to sound him out, you know—I mean, it’s been years, decades, since he worked Organized Crime, but Olly’s always had his ear to the ground, always been well networked. Anyway, his phone was off for hours. He called me back that night, we talked, and he told me. He’d been in the hospital. Palliative radiotherapy. It manages the pain, slows things down, although by the looks of him . . .”
“Does he know how long?”
“If he does, he isn’t saying. He doesn’t want the sympathy. He’s been passing it off as a bad RA flare-up as much as he can.”
“Dyer knows, presumably?”
She nods. “I’d say it’s hit her hard.”
“We can’t think about that. It’s not our place to get sentimental.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that, Kinsella. Thank you.” She glances sideways. “God, it’s come to something when I’m being lectured on empathy by you, of all people. If I said Cairns is to Dyer what Parnell is to you, or he certainly used to be, would that soften your hard heart?”
“Is her career definitely finished?” I ask, punching away the thought of a seriously ill Parnell rattling around a big, lonely house. “I mean, as in finished finished? If she was acting under Cairns’ instruction . . .”
“That might wash if I ordered you to do something dodgy, but Dyer’s a DCI. She should have known better.” She thinks about it some more. “There’s a small chance they could be lenient, I suppose. She might not lose her job entirely. But the career she had planned, that’s finished. They’ll definitely take action against her.”
“And Cairns.”
She turns and looks back down the road, toward the house. “Well, he hardly needs the pension, does he? And he’s dying. Suspended sentence is my guess, but God knows.”
Despite everything, it’s hard not to feel sad about a life ending in pain, probable loneliness, and complete reputational ruin.
“So what did he have to say about Fellows?”
She looks distracted. “Who?”
“Cairns. Or didn’t you get around to that? I guess, ‘I’ve got terminal cancer’ is a bit of conversation stopper.”
“Oh no, we did. He didn’t have a lot to say, though. He knows who Fellows is, of course—hadn’t a clue he was gay, which surprised me a bit; Olly always used to have the goss on everyone. But he hadn’t a clue how he’d be connected to this case either. Said his name certainly never surfaced the first time around, although can we trust anything he says now? He’s a corrupt police officer, Cat. A criminal.”
Which makes me what, exactly?
The lights of New York City have never burned as brightly as they do right now.